Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] RFD: New language to write dissectors

[Richard Sharpe <realrichardsharpe@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 10:53 PM, Jakub Zawadzki
<darkjames-ws@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 08:10:42PM -0700, Richard Sharpe wrote:
>> On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 2:20 AM, Jakub Zawadzki <darkjames-ws@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Well, it might look stupid to you, but it represents a quick way to
>> get simplify the process of producing dissectors, and writing a
>> dissector is very boring.
>
> Forgot word, once again: *Manually* translating 4K lines of NPL code to C looks stupid to me (...)
>
>> In addition, to produce Wireshark C-based dissectors from NPL would
>> seem not to require LLVM. A simple recursive descent parser should
>> suffice.
>
> LLVM is not parser generator (in wireshark we use lemon for it), and if we talk about boredom,
> writting recursive descent parser is boring ;-)

I should have said more :-)

We can do the parsing any way we want. However, it seems that we do
not need LLVM if we are just producing dissectors as C code. We would
only need it if we want to compile all the way into some sort of byte
code for dissectors.

However, AFAIK, there is no such dissector VM today. There is a VM for
filtering, but not for dissection.

-- 
Regards,
Richard Sharpe
(何以解憂？唯有杜康。--曹操)