kaitai-io/kaitai_struct

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases no_license

Adoption not part of the score

4664 stars · 209 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Kaitai Struct is a declarative language for describing binary data structures (file formats, network packet layouts) in .ksy files. A compiler generates ready-to-use parsers in many target languages including C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and Rust.

Use cases

• parse binary file formats without hand-writing parsers
• reverse engineer unknown file formats
• dissect network packet protocols
• generate parsers for the same format in multiple programming languages
• extract assets from game or firmware binary files
• document and share binary format specifications

When to choose

• you need to parse a binary format across several languages
• you want a declarative, maintainable spec instead of error-prone manual parsing code
• you are reverse engineering file formats or protocols
• you want to reuse a large library of pre-defined format descriptions

When to avoid

• you need to write (serialize) binary data as well as read it — writing support is limited
• your format is highly dynamic or requires complex procedural parsing logic
• your target language is not among the supported ones
• you need a runtime-configurable parser rather than compiled code

Facets

library · maturity active

parser serialization developer-tools reverse-engineering parsers files reverse-engineering developer-tools programming-languages cross-platform cpp go rust python jvm ruby php lua dotnet binary-format declarative-language code-generation protocol-analysis file-format ksy javascript nim perl

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="kaitai-io/kaitai_struct")