mpw / nail

A practical interface generator for data formats.

Nail

\textit{Nail} is an interface generator that allows programmers to safely parse and generate protocols defined by a Parser-Expression based grammar. Nail also provides solutions for parsing common patterns such as length and offset fields within binary formats that are hard to process with existing parser generators.

Installation & Pre-requisites

The code generator (in /generator/) requires a C++ compiler and depends on boost. The code generator can either be invoked as ./nail foo.nail , which case it will emit C++ code (in foo.nail.cc and foo.nail.hh) , or as ./cnail foo.nail in which case it will emit a two-pass parser in C (in foo.nail.c and foo.nail.h) . Generated code has no dependencies (and does not even use the C++ or C standard library). longjmp.h/setjmp.h is used for handling out of memory errors.

Examples

Several examples are provided, pull requests for more are very welcome!

• /dns - DNS server and resolver implemented in C. Used for older benchmarks
• /dns_cpp - DNS server implemented in C++, used for newer benchmarks
• /zip - ZIP extractor,compressor in C.
• /protozip - Simplified 'pretend' zip, easier to grok
• /utf16 - mini grammar for UTF-16 -- good starting point

Network stack

Nail has a (very prototype-y) network stack. Find it in /network/. The network stack depends on boost and (soon) Intel TBB and DPDK .