Ari

Ari is an early research project designed to make binary files more accessible. It's a purely functional programming language and library intended to act as foundation for building developer tools that can manipulate arbitrary binary files. It can be used as a basis for building a structural binary differ, or a tree-based editor for directly editing binary files.

It aims to reach this goal by tackling the biggest obstacle with binary data: the need for implicit format-specific knowledge to understand how binary files are structured. Over time, we'll build up a repository of file formats encoded in Ari (called "Ari types"), which can then be used to compile a "type radix tree" from any given set of Ari types. This "type radix tree" will be used as an efficient way to interpret a single file as multiple formats at once, while trimming out invalid interpretations along the way of parsing.

Ari fundamentally differs from existing approaches like Kaitai Struct, GNU poke, and even parser generator tools like Tree-sitter in that it's heavily based around the combination of algebraic type theory & set theory and sits in-between a data specification language that doesn't have support for functions, and a fully Turing complete language that has no guarantee of halting. The plan is to work together with these other projects as they each have their own unique approach that Ari isn't focused on, whereas Ari is more of a research project intended to explore what's possible.