Thread by @theavalkyrie

God help me

Structy generates code by reading a schema written using Python syntax:

In vs Out (c):

Note that I said "Python syntax" not Python. I'm just using Python's parser to generate an AST and just reading that to generate the code.

To pack and unpack the struct, the generated code uses a lightweight library based on Python's "struct" library. It uses format specifiers to pack stuff in. Think printf for binary data:

Since it knows about types, it can also generate a nice debug print function for the struct. It even handles the custom "fix16_t" type.

Oh yeah I got Python generation kind of working too.

I still got a bit to do before I release this to the world. But you might be asking why I'm doing this instead of using .... anything else.

The reason is that I like to keep my firmware super small and super simple. Protobuf & friends just... are too much.

Structy is made to replace some C code in my firmware that looks like this:

Everytime I added or updated a field for that struct I'd have to update this function, the matching serialization function, and the Python & JavaScript versions! That's like... 6 places I have to update! Ugh. (python code pictured)

It's fragile and annoying, but protobuf & friends are *overkill*. I just need to pass some dumb structs with scalar fields.

Hence, structy.