prophy: fast data interchange format toolchain
Project description
prophy is a cross-language, cross-platform data interchange format. It has compiler and runtime libraries and is similar in purpose to:
Requirements
Python 2.7
libclang, at least 3.4
Python libclang adapter with corresponding version
Encoding
prophy message wire format differs from other toolchains. There are no field tags, message delimiters and integer packing.
This protobuf message:
message Test {
required int32 x = 1;
}
with x set to 150 encodes as:
08 96 01
while this prophy message:
#include <stdint.h>
struct Test {
int32_t x;
};
with x set to 150 encodes as:
96 00 00 00
or:
00 00 00 96
depending on endianness.
prophy ensures that each field in message is aligned. This allows to manipulate message directly in serialized buffer and contributes to encoding speed.
prophy supports integers, enums, arrays and unions.
Sack
One format in which prophy message can be defined is a mix of C language and patches, called sack.
With this definition (test.hpp):
#include <stdint.h>
struct Test {
uint32_t num_of_x;
uint32_t x[1];
};
and this patch (patch.txt):
Test dynamic x num_of_x
this command:
prophyc --sack --patch patch.txt --python_out . test.hpp
creates a Python codec (test.py):
import prophy
class Test(prophy.struct):
__metaclass__ = prophy.struct_generator
_descriptor = [('num_of_x', prophy.u32),
('x', prophy.array(prophy.u32, bound = 'num_of_x'))]
which can be used in following way:
>>> import test
>>> msg = test.Test()
>>> msg.x[:] = [1, 2]
>>> msg.encode('<')
'\x02\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\x00\x02\x00\x00\x00'
>>> print x
x: 1
x: 2
Isar
Another format is xml, called isar.
With this definition (test.xml):
<xml>
<struct name="Test">
<member name="x" type="u32">
<dimension isVariableSize="true"/>
</member>
</struct>
</xml>
this command:
prophyc --isar --python_out . test.xml
generates identical codec to one from previous example.
Work remaining
Prophy is a work in progress. In order to make it resemble mature frameworks it needs:
C/C++ outputs in prophyc compiler,
dedicated message definition language as input.
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