Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] RFD: New language to write dissectors

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jul 16, 2012, at 7:18 AM, Richard Sharpe wrote:

> We can do the parsing any way we want. However, it seems that we do
> not need LLVM if we are just producing dissectors as C code. We would
> only need it if we want to compile all the way into some sort of byte
> code for dissectors.

	$ gcc
	-bash: gcc: command not found
	$ clang
	-bash: clang: command not found
	$ cc
	-bash: cc: command not found

		...

Obviously not my machine, which *does* have gcc and clang installed, and in which cc is a link to gcc, but if somebody's not interested in writing C code but *is* interested in adding a new protocol to Wireshark, and doesn't have a C compiler installed, either translating to an interpreted bytecode or to, for example, LLVM language:

	http://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html

and JITting it into your machine code, could be useful.

> However, AFAIK, there is no such dissector VM today. There is a VM for
> filtering, but not for dissection.

There isn't, but perhaps there should be.