JCjchw·Mar 26, 2022
My project Restruct[1] does Kaitai-like things but also supports serialization. Unfortunately, it only supports Go and only deals with Go struct tags rather than YAML manifests. Still, it totally can be used for serialization. I use it to sketch out quick projects against arbitrary binary formats. Two examples: one, parsing PNG headers to implement a quick binwalk-like program for just PNG that looks for the IEND chunk to extract accurately[2], two, a program that splits FL Studio FLP projects by playlist track[3].
I feel like I’ve self-promoted Restruct like four times on Hacker News, and I feel kind of bad because it could use improvements and even some bug fixes and I never seem to get around to it. Oh well. It’s still useful for me, I hope it’s useful for others, too.
That said, Kaitai has a fairly clear path towards adding serializat
Read the rest
ion from a design PoV; many things that would be calculated for parsing structures in deserialization could just become checks/assertions in serialization. As an example, checking that an expression calculates out to the expected value would be a reasonable approach. Reversible expressions could be implemented for some cases, too, if you want it to do more of the heavy lifting. I think the biggest obstacle is actually implementing it, and frankly my Scala is too weak to help with such a relatively big undertaking.
I’ve also played with the rust nom library, which implements functional programming style parser combinators. It is quite cool how it can express fairly complex grammars and binary formats pretty much equally well, albeit optimizing it effectively requires serious magic that I do not think nom has. (I assume in Haskell, the same thing can be done with mind-boggling optimization power.) It also doesn’t handle serialization, but it’s still worth noting for robust deserialization.
[1]: https://github.com/go-restruct/restruct
[2]: https://github.com/jchv/pngextract
[3]: https://github.com/jchv/flsplit