3.12 Offsets and Sizes

Early in the design of what is becoming GNU poke I was struck by a problem that, to my surprise, would prove not easy to fix in a satisfactory way: would I make a byte-oriented program, or a bit-oriented program? Considering that the program in question was nothing less than an editor for binary data, this was no petty dilemma.

Since the very beginning I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to achieve: a binary editor that would be capable of editing user defined data structures, besides mere bytes and bits. I also knew I needed some sort of domain specific language to describe these structures and operate on them. How that language would look like, and what kind of abstractions it would provide, however, was not clear to me. Not at all.

So once I sketched an initial language design, barely something very similar to C structs, I was determined to not continue with the poke implementation until I had described as many as binary formats in my language as possible. That, I reckoned, was the only way to make sure the implemented language would be expressive, complete and useful enough to fulfil my requirements.

The first formats I implemented using my immature little language included ELF, FLV, MP3, BSON… all of them describing structures based on whole bytes. Even when they try to be compact, it is always by packing bit-fields in elements that are, invariably, sized as a multiple of bytes. Consequently, the language I was evolving became byte oriented as well. No doubt also influenced by my C inheritance, I would think of bit-fields either as a sort of second class citizen, or as mere results of shifting and masking.

This worked well. The language evolved to be able to express many different aspects of these formats in a very nice way, like variable-length data and holes in structures.

Consider the following definition, which is not valid in today’s Poke:

type Data =
  struct
  {
    byte magic;
    byte count;
    byte dstart;

    byte[count] data @ dstart;
  };

The data starts with a byte that is a magic number. Then the size of the data stored, in bytes, and then the data itself. This data, however, doesn’t start right after dstart: it starts at dstart, which is expressed as an offset, in bytes, since the beginning of the Data. I conceived struct field labels to be any expression evaluating to an integer, which would be interpreted as a number of bytes, obviously.

Then, one day, it was the turn for IETF RFC1951, which is the specification of the DEFLATE algorithm and associated file format. Oh dear. Near the beginning of the spec document it can be read:

This document does not address the issue of the order in which bits of a byte are transmitted on a bit-sequential medium, since the final data format described here is byte- rather than bit-oriented. However, we describe the compressed block format in below, as a sequence of data elements of various bit lengths, not a sequence of bytes.

Then it goes on describing rules to pack the DEFLATE elements into bytes. I was appalled, and certainly sort of deflated as well. The purpose of my program was precisely to edit binary in terms of the data elements described by a format. And in this case, these data elements came in all sort of bit lengths and alignments. This can be seen in the following RFC1951 excerpt, that describes the header of a compressed block:

Each block of compressed data begins with 3 header bits containing the following data:

first bit       BFINAL
next 2 bits     BTYPE

Note that the header bits do not necessarily begin on a byte boundary, since a block does not necessarily occupy an integral number of bytes.

At this point I understood that my little language on the works would never be capable to describe the DEFLATE structures naturally: C-like bit-fields, masking and shifting, all based on byte-oriented containers and boundaries, would never provide the slickness I wanted for my editor. I mean, just use C and get done with it.

This pissed me off. Undoubtedly other formats and protocols would be impacted in a similar way. Even when most formats are byte oriented, what am I supposed to tell to the people hacking bit-oriented stuff? “Sorry pal, this is not supported, this program is not for you”? No way, I thought, not on my watch.

The obvious solution for the problem, is to be general. In this case, to express every offset and every memory size in bits instead of bytes. While this obviously gives the language maximum expressiveness power, and is ideal for expressing the few bit-oriented formats, it has the disadvantage of being very inconvenient for most situations.

To see how annoying this is, let’s revisit the little BitData structure we saw above. In a bit-oriented description language, we would need to write something like:

type BitData =
  struct
  {
    byte magic;
    byte count;
    byte dstart;

    byte[count] data @ dstart * 8;
  };

Yeah… exactly. The * and 8 keys in the keyboards of the poke users would wear out very fast, not to mention their patience as well. Also, should I provide both sizeof and bitsizeof operators? Nasty.

I am very fond of the maxim “Never write a program you would never use yourself”⁵, so I resigned myself to make GNU poke byte oriented, and to provide as many facilities for operating on bit-fields as possible.

Fortunately, I have smart friends…

During one of the Rabbit Herd’s Hacking Weekends⁶ I shared my frustration and struggle with the other rabbits, and we came to realize that offsets and data sizes in Poke should not be pure magnitudes or mere integer values: they should be united. They should have units.

It makes full sense when you come to think about it. For a program like poke, it is only natural to talk about different memory units, like bits, bytes, kilobytes, megabits, and so on. Bits and bytes are just two common units.

The syntax that we eventually used to denote united values is to specify the magnitude part, a hash ('#' character, and then the unit. For example, the size “three bytes” is expressed as 3#B, and “three bits” as 3#b.

Apart from allowing me to express values in different units, this approach also has other benefits as we will see shortly.

I’m really grateful to Bruno Haible, Luca Saiu and Nacho Gonzalez for putting me on the right track.