CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++serializationlegacy
pixsperdavid
pixsperdavid

Reputation: 147

C++ Serialization Library for Existing Protocol

I'm writing a C++ library for an existing networking protocol (one with an document specifying the exact packet layout). As there are a considerable number of packet definitions, rather than writing all the serialization/de-serialization methods manually, are there any serialization libraries which are capable of specifying a packet layout specifically?

I've been looking at things like Google Protobuf and Apache Thrift, but they seem to be focused towards developing a server and client in tandem, where the packet layout does not matter along as it is consistent across a single release of the software. I need to serialize to an existing specification, so need to determine the field ordering, length, endianness, etc. explicitly. Is there anything that can help make this less of a chore?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 128

Answers (1)

bazza
bazza

Reputation: 8444

There is a library/tools called PADS which should be ideal for this. See this SO answer here, the project home page here, some GitHub-ish stuff here. There seems to be some Haskell related stuff here. I've just tried and succeeded in downloading PADS/C from the homepage (note that the download server's username and password are given at the bottom of their license agreement).

It's a bit like writing a Google Protocol Buffer schema, except you're specifying bits/bytes in an arbitrary data stream, which is what you have.

I tried to get PADS/ML downloaded from https://github.com/yitzhakm/PADS-ML working some time ago, but ran into a lot of trouble and ultimately failed.

As you're interested in C (which is about as close to C++ as you're going to get) you might try the PADS/C library.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions