About a year ago, I wrote about a tool for creating binary structures more easily. It was inspired by Erlang's binary packing syntax, and was for a scenario where a server was creating small binary for a client that didn't speak Java (i.e., so simple serialization wasn't a possibility)
I recently decided to recreate it, but this new version is a whole new beast. It's still inspired by Erlang's syntax, but I'm enhancing that syntax, I rearchitected it, and I wrote it in Scala.
The very early version of DSByte, as I call it, can be found under my github account. It currently only supports packing from objects into binary, but I'll add unpacking from binary into objects soon.
One of the things I like about Scala is built-in support for simple DSLs, and this was a good opportunity to exercise that feature. While the parser combinator feature takes a bit of getting used to, it's quicker and friendlier than ANTLR, though it's also less powerful. But for my need, it fit the bill nicely.
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