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Ask HN: Is there a tool to generate binary protocol figures out of a spec?

 2 years ago
source link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30895905
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Ask HN: Is there a tool to generate binary protocol figures out of a spec?

Ask HN: Is there a tool to generate binary protocol figures out of a spec? 11 points by vodou 1 hour ago | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments I need to document quite many different binary formats and would like to present them with a figure visualizing the different fields, their length and names.

Similar to how internet protocols are presented in RFC documents, but rather not in text mode. Preferably in some vector format, like SVG, to make it easy to embed these figures in different kind of documents.

Up to now I have mainly used Microsoft Visio or even Excel for this. This is very tedious and ineffective. I think there must exist a tool for this where you just define the protocol (e.g. using Kaitai Struct syntax or something simlar) and then generate the protocol figure.

So far I have only found tools for generating such figures in text format.

Any suggestions?

I used Wavedrom to generate beautiful SVGs for a similar purpose in the past. Maybe it is useful for you, too:

https://github.com/wavedrom/wavedrom

IIRC, thrift (https://thrift.apache.org/) could render defined types/structs to an SVG.

Edited to add: it’s the graphviz generator -> https://thrift.apache.org/tutorial/graphviz.html

I’d guess gRPC and other such IDLs have a way to render similar things as well.

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