goblin 0.0.2

An impish, cross-platform binary parsing and loading crate
Documentation

libgoblin Build Status

say the right words

Features

  • goblins (TBA)
  • the best, most feature complete ELF64 implementation, ever.
  • begrudging ELF32 support, with type punning!
  • many cfg options - it will make your head spin, and make you angry when reading the source!
  • slowly adding mach-o and PE binary support, mostly because it's boring and it's just a port of rdr
  • tests
  • awesome crate name

Libgoblin aims to be your one-stop shop for binary parsing, loading, and analysis. Eventually, at some future date, once the holy trinity is finished (ELF, mach, PE), writers for the various binary formats are planned.

Use-cases and Planned Features

Here are some things you could do with this crate (or help to implement so they could be done):

  1. write a compiler and use it to generate binaries with the future writers defined here
  2. write a binary analysis tool which parses all three formats
  3. write a non-functioning dynamic linker because libc implementations define massive, persistent global state and are tightly coupled with their dynamic linker implementations, because *nix is broken by design ;)
  4. write a kernel and load binaries using the forthcoming "pure" cfg. I.e., it is essentially just struct and const defs (like a C header) - no fd, no output, no std.
  5. write a bin2json tool (http://github.com/m4b/bin2json), because why shouldn't binary formats be in JSON?

Cfgs

libgoblin is designed to be massively configurable; by default however, all binary targets are default opted in. Therefore, you must opt out, in contrast to rust guidelines. This may change before the 1.0 release, in which case you will have to opt in (the negation).

Currently the feature flags are:

  • no_elf
  • no_elf32
  • no_mach
  • no_mach32
  • no_pe
  • no_pe32
  • no_endian_fd

Planned flags:

  • pure

Note: the non-suffixed 32 binary formats are default 64 bit, because I'm trying to brainwash everyone into forgetting about 32-bit binary formats. It's not working, and I may add 64 bit suffixes to make this clear.

The planned pure flag, as stated above, is essentially just struct and const defs (like a C header) - no fd, no output, no std - suitable for use in kernel development environments or other somesuch stuff.