See https://github.com/google/wuffs/blob/main/doc/related-work.m...
> Kaitai Struct is in a similar space, generating safe parsers for multiple target programming languages from one declarative specification. Again, Wuffs differs in that it is a complete (and performant) end to end implementation, not just for the structured parts of a file format. Repeating a point in the previous paragraph, the difficulty in decoding the GIF format isn't in the regularly-expressible part of the format, it's in the LZW compression. Kaitai's GIF parser returns the compressed LZW data as an opaque blob.
Taking PNG as an example, Kaitai will tell you the image's metadata (including width and height) and that the compressed pixels are in the such-and-such part of the file. But unlike Wuffs, Kaitai doesn't actually decode the compressed pixels.
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Wuffs' generated C code also doesn't need any capabilities, including the ability to malloc or free. Its example/mzcat program (equivalent to /bin/bzcat or /bin/zcat, for decoding BZIP2 or GZIP) self-imposes a SECCOMP_MODE_STRICT sandbox, which is so restrictive (and secure!) that it prohibits any syscalls other than read, write, _exit and sigreturn.
(I am the Wuffs author.)
Wuffs looks pretty awesome. Thanks for making it.
Wuffs is intended for files. But, would it be a bad idea to use it to parse network data from untrusted endpoints?
It's a great idea. Chromium uses Wuffs to parse GIF data from the untrusted network.
There's also a "wget some JSON and pipe that to what Wuffs calls example/jsonptr" example at https://nigeltao.github.io/blog/2020/jsonptr.html#sandboxing