[schamper]

Author here, this is a valid point but there are also valid reasons to choose C structures. The larger framework that this is a part of is primarily targeted towards people working in cybersecurity, not software engineers. Cybersecurity people are very often not great software engineers and there is a high throughput of “throwaway” scripts, or “make a quick hacky change”. C is commonly already well understood, a bespoke DSL usually is not and requires a learning step. You can “hit the ground running”, so to say.

And, as a bonus, creating, say, a filesystem implementation is now often as easy as copy/pasting existing C structure definitions, either from the original source (which is usually C) or from reversing tools such as IDA/Ghidra.

There’s no right or wrong way in my opinion, just preferences.

[a_e_k]

I became a fan of Kaitai Struct [0] when doing some amateur sleuthing last year. It has a web-based IDE [1] for writing and testing structure definitions against hex dumps, and can generate binary parsers in Python (and many other languages) right from the Web IDE.

[0] https://doc.kaitai.io/user_guide.html

[1] https://ide.kaitai.io/devel/