Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] newbie question about dissection specifications
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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 31 May 2016 15:45:24 -0700
On May 31, 2016, at 3:26 PM, Graham Bloice <graham.bloice@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Isn't the ability to produce protocol implementations one of the "features" of ASN.1?

I'm not sure a full implementation could be produced, but serializing/deserializing code can be generated from ASN.1 - and from ONC RPC's rpcgen language, and DCE RPC's various IDLs, CORBA's GIOP IDL, and probably others.

(And we do, in fact, generate dissectors from ASN.1, Samba's PIDL for DCE RPC, and CORBA's GIOP IDL - with some help from "conformance files", which provide "Details regarding desired properties of C / C++ / Python / etc. code generated from those layout descriptions."  The more dissection that can be done by generated code - whether it's generated C/C++ code, generated Lua/Python/etc. code, or generated bytecode with our own interpreter - the better, as that makes it easier to add new protocols and, hopefully, harder to add new protocols with bugs in the dissector.)