The only technical comment I have is that it continues to be amazing to me that destructuring binary data is so stupidly verbose in so many languages. I think C and Erlang are the only two languages that got this right.
Erlang I can easily see (destructuring binary data in erlang is an absolute pleasure) but C? Most binary destructuring in C seems to be done with shifts and masks, there's some gain from implicit integral conversions but I don't remember it being "right". IIRC the memory layout of bitfields is not specified so you can't use them to portably destructure binary streams, only to define "packed" structures for memory saving.
> IIRC the memory layout of bitfields is not specified so you can't use them to portably destructure binary streams, only to define "packed" structures for memory saving.
This is correct as my colleagues have recently relearned. Moving from one endianness to another seriously complicated their lives for a few weeks (time to initial discovery of error, time to add in new definitions, time to test the updated system).
> IIRC the memory layout of bitfields is not specified so you can't use them to portably destructure binary streams
This is true, but for many of us in the embedded world, we use the specific packing anyway. I know my endianness, and I know my compiler--so my structs map straight across.
