(author of the post here)

Hey dsab! I agree, but CCSDS is what we have today. We need to support it properly first if we ever want to extend or transition away. It also doesn't help that there's no good open-source implementation of the whole stack, especially the SDLS part, which makes the transition even harder.

On the type-safety side, I found typed combinators really useful for describing parsing and serialising (see my earlier post on ocaml-wire[1]), and keeping the protocol logic pure (separate from I/O) makes the whole thing much easier to test and reason about. OCaml's fuzzing support pairs really well with types too. This is basically the nqsb-TLS approach [2], which has held up in ocaml-tls for a decade.

[1] https://gazagnaire.org/blog/2026-03-31-ocaml-wire.html [2] https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity15/technical...