Introducing Crunch: A Message Definition Protocol for Getting Things Right
There are a lot of different tools for defining structured messages and working with their serialized representations for communication over-the-wire. I have worked with open source, closed source, and hand-rolled toolchains tackling this problem. Every tool I have seen has a serious design flaw that makes them very difficult to use correctly in mission-critical contexts. Validation - both of individual fields and of whole messages - is completely decoupled from the message definitions. This is a fundamental gap in how messages are specified. A comprehensive description of what makes a message valid is equally important in system design as the types and names of the fields. ...