giferly VS linux

I absolutely love the "What's In A GIF" series. It's what inspired me to write my own GIF decoder while learning Erlang at the same time: https://github.com/avik-das/giferly

The first time around, I struggled a lot with decoding errors. Many years later, after being a more experienced developer, I wrote the LZW decompression with unit tests. Doing so forced me to think about each edge case, and fix issues without breaking existing functionality. Very quickly, I was able to open pretty much any GIF file I threw at it!

Okay, so of interest but maybe not applicable to my usecase. Thanks:)

Yeah, it remains to be seen how complex the actual format/code is. Would need to balance the difficulty of recreating it (which I assume to be quite high) against difficulty of extracting kernel code... although https://github.com/lkl/linux exists so for all I know maybe it's easy¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And yes, if I needed to actually write a "tar2ext4" tool today - like, start working in the morning and have it done by EOD - I would absolutely use... actually probably a loopback device rather than a true ramdisk, but yeah. But that requires root access and fiddling with loopback config, which seems excessive for what is, ultimately, just another archive format (from a certain point of view). And honestly some of it is just that it sounds fun to get my hands dirty with filesystem code in userspace:)