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by higherhalf 1826 days ago
> I'm surprised this is written in Rust and doesn't use the object crate--did the author do this in part to learn how elf works?

No. When I started the project I was expecting to just read data into the ELF structs, in style of C. (Un)fortunately, it's not possible to do safely, so I started looking into crates to do that, and was stumbling upon data deserialization ones. In particular, the first attempt was in nom. In hindsight, that wasn't particularly smart, and specific object-file-parsing ones would be better. I don't regret implementing reading manually, despite it looking pretty ugly, because attending to NIH syndrome is fun.

> Speaking of visualizing virtual memory, one of the things that I haven't seen a nice prior tool for is breaking down the memory map of a process on a per-section basis

That is planned. It's noted in readme, and in issue #3 I go over how it can look like[1].

[1]: https://github.com/ruslashev/elfcat/issues/3#issuecomment-86...