flsplit VS Kaitai Struct

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 serialization 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.)

[1]: https://github.com/go-restruct/restruct

[2]: https://github.com/jchv/pngextract

[3]: https://github.com/jchv/flsplit

- ImHex [2], which has a pattern language [3] which allows parsing, and it seems more powerful than what Kaitai offers. I stumbled upon some limitations with it but it was still useful.

[1]: https://kaitai.io/

Beautiful. Didn't know something like this exists. Reminds me of Katai[0]

[0]. https://kaitai.io/

An EDID override like this would be helpful for macOS as well, where the monitors swapping around after standby is a real annoyance [0] [1]

EDID rewrites are 99% of the time blocked by the monitor firmware: https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/Decoding-monitor-EDID-on-macO...

By the way, one helpful tool that helped me navigate the EDID dump was Kaitai Struct [2]. It shows a side by side view with the hex view and the EDID structure, and it highlights the hex values in real time as you navigate the structure. Unfortunately [3] it doesn't support the extension blocks that the author needs.

[0] https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/Weird-monitor-bugs

[1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/external-displays-swapp...

[2] https://kaitai.io/

[3] https://github.com/kaitai-io/edid.ksy

Kaitai Struct might be a good choice for that: https://kaitai.io/

For binary log format, there's the excellent Kaitai Struct frameworks, that make it very easy to generate parsers from a declarative schema

kaitai

https://kaitai.io/

Worth a look if you are writing binary parsers.