On: Kaitai: Describe the structure of data, not how you read or write it

[vander_elst]

If I understand it correctly, katai generates for you the reader as well, while protobuf generates only the data container. Katai is more a sort of protobuf + grpc for reading data.

[jackjeff → vander_elst]

Big difference is Katai is designed to parse existing binary formats like PNG, JPEG, MIDI, WAV files.

Things like Protobuf can serialize/deserialize any data but it’s very opiniated about how to do this. You won’t convince it to work with existing file formats.

[lima → vander_elst]

Protobufs generate readers/writers for various languages (i.e. serialization/deserializiation).

gRPC is an RPC framework that uses Protobufs.