Kaitai Struct: A new way to develop parsers for binary structures
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2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
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HN comment orderThere's also Wuffs, a safe and fast programming language made by Google specifically for decoding and encoding file formats https://github.com/google/wuffs Paired with C FFI available in most languages, this seems like the nicer solution. It's simpler than generating code for a bunch of high level languages, and more performant
Kaitai is absolutely one of my favorite projects. I use it for work (parsing scientific formats, prototyping and exploring those formats, etc) as well as for fun (reverse engineering games, formats for DOSbox core dumps, etc). I gave a guest lecture in a friend's class last week where we used Kaitai to back out the file format used in "Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego" and it was a total blast. (For me. Not sure that the class agreed? Maybe.)…
The format gallery has some lovely examples. I was initially skeptical, but this is quite nice. For other people who might not look as far, it seems that the main advantage of this over other solutions (PB, Cap'n Proto, Flatbuffers, etc.) is that you can describe types that don't originate in the Kaitai ecosystem, and come out with code that can correctly read and manipulate those datatypes. One slightly unfortunate item -- I don't see anything about using the generated…
Previous discussion from 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14175037 (13 comments)
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