Graham Bloice wrote:
Might be interesting for some:
binpac: A yacc for Writing Application Protocol Parsers
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2496
Sebastien Tandel mentioned that back in May - I didn't get around to
replying back then; thanks for reminding me of this and getting me to
reply. Apologies to Sebastien for not replying then....
Yes, something such as this would, I suspect, be a Very Good Thing.
It'd be interesting to see how many handwritten dissectors could be
replaced by dissectors written in binpac - and whether we could do an
interpreted version of binpac, so that users could write dissectors
without having to build them as plugins. (I'd also be curious whether
such an interpreter could be small enough to fit in an L2 cache, or even
an L1 cache, and, if so, whether that would reduce the code cache
footprint enough to make it a performance win.)
It would make it easier to write dissectors - and easier to write safe
dissectors. It might also mean that the generated code could
automatically handle the "just construct the summary line" vs. "build
the protocol tree" decision (and also make sure expert information is
added regardless of whether a protocol tree is being built or not.
