Expand description
elf
The elf crate provides an interface for reading ELF object files.
Capabilities
Contains no unsafe code: Many of the other rust ELF parsers out there contain bits of unsafe code deep down or in dependencies to reinterpret/transmute byte contents as structures in order to drive zero-copy parsing. They’re slick, and that also introduces unsafe code blocks (albeit small ones). This crate strives to serve as an alternate implementation with zero unsafe code blocks.
Endian-aware: This crate properly handles translating between file and host endianness when parsing the ELF contents.
Lazy parsing: This crate strives for lazy evaluation and parsing when
possible. For example, the SymbolTable simply
acts as an interpretation layer on top of a &[u8]. Parsing of
Symbols takes place only when symbols are requested.
Tiny compiled library size: At the time of writing this, the release lib was only ~30kB!
Future plans
Add no_std option: Currently, the main impediment to a no_std option is the
use of allocating datastructures, such as the parsed section contents’ Vec
Lazily loading section contents: Currently, all of the section data is read
from the input stream into allocated Vec
A potential future vision for both of these issues is to rework the parsing code’s reader trait implementations to provide two options:
- A wrapper around a
&[u8]which already contains the full ELF contents. This could be used for a no_std option where we want to simply parse out the ELF structures from the existing data without needing to heap-allocate buffers in which to store the reads. - An allocating CachedReader type which wraps a stream which can allocate
and remember Vec
buffers in which to land the data from file reads.
The former no_std option is useful when you need no_std, however it forces the user to invoke the performance penalty of reading the entire file contents up front.
The latter option is useful for use-cases that only want to interpret parts of an ELF object, where allocating buffers to store the reads is a much smaller cost than reading in the whole large object contents.
Re-exports
pub use file::File;