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manuels / taikai

kaitai-like serialization
https://docs.rs/taikai/
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Clarification: what does "Kaitai-like" mean? #1

Open ErichDonGubler opened 5 years ago

ErichDonGubler commented 5 years ago

It'd be wonderful if we had some ecosystem backing for using *.ksy files! However, it's hard to tell what you mean by "Kaitai-like" in the README. Does this mean that this crate accepts a syntax that is similar to but may be arbitrarily different from a ksy definition? Is there some realistic expectation of compatibility?

manuels commented 5 years ago

You are absolutely right about this. Some of the main differences is that taikai uses rust notation for numerical primitive (i.e. u8 instead of u1 for a byte, ...). Also if conditions in kaitai are represented in a python-like syntax if: foo and _parent._parent.bar whereas taikai uses a rust expressions if: self.foo && _parents.1.bar(note the self and the different way to access parents - _parents is a tuple in taikai where the nearest parent is the zeroth entry and the Nth parent is _parents.{N-1})

EDIT: also see https://github.com/manuels/netlink-wg/blob/master/src/netlink_generic.tsy for an example (it would be much nicer, one "switch-on types" are implemented.

ErichDonGubler commented 5 years ago

It'd be great to avoid fracturing the ecosystem, though I'm not sure what tradeoffs you're attempting to make here. Would it be possible to eventually either make taikai syntax a superset of Kaitai syntax, or perhaps have a mode where Kaitai logic is used instead?

Either way, this crate is interesting, and I'm glad somebody's spending time on it!