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Comment by asn1argh | Hacker News Reader

The spec is too big, and it's too hard to implement correctly (let alone efficiently).

you are using it all the time without realizing it. http://www.marben-products.com/asn.1/market.html

protobuf, swift, etc happened when an advertising company thinks it is an engineering company

Perhaps they should do more marketing, because speaking as a C++ developer: I picked between protobufs, flatbuffers and capt'n proto because they were easy to use, had active communities, and they had websites which explained how and why I should use their compiler/library/protocol.

When I search the web for information about asn.1, I find very little that is of practical use. What library should I use? Why should I use it? How does it benchmark in comparison to the other tools? I've seen a few asn.1 library webpages and they all seem to take it as a given that I'm just looking for some way to deal with asn.1 data. They don't bother to try to convince me that their tool is efficient, or even that asn.1 is the right choice for my data in the first place.

you are dismissing an old and proven technology because you feel it is not marketing to you effectively, which is the backend to the global telecom system (ss7) for the past two decades? why is this a movement in computer science to throw out old things that work? this is confusing to me like nosql. but "good marketing" is something that is called cap'n proto, sounds like a joke?

if you are curious here is a good blog post https://ttsiodras.github.io/asn1.html

i am working with asn.1 the protocol MMS

Well, the only location many programmers nowadays stumble over ASN.1 is in certificates. And ASN.1 parsing from them has a history of massive security issues and results in massive warnings of "do not touch!".

And yes, "good marketing" in the form of readily available and well-documented libraries for the languages we use is a very important factor.

I bet the telecom sector has their battle-tested libraries for ASN.1, or at least for the parts they use. Are they open-source? Are they available for all languages wanted? No? Then why would I use ASN.1, just to use a "standard", if it means using worse code or writing it myself?

More broadly, he is talking about the community. That is what makes or breaks a technology today, and the community for asn.1 doesn't exist. It also lacks many of the features protobufs have, like versioning or associative map, not to mention it is ugly.

Sorry to disappoint, but I don't really consider myself a computer scientist. My degree was EE with a focus on communications. I then spent a five years shuffling bits between custom protocols for unmanned vehicles.

The data format isn't hard. It doesn't particularly impress me that asn.1 has worked for 20 years when I've seen hand-rolled formats do the same. The hard part of the process is defining the actual messages anyway.

The part that is valuable is the library and the tooling that makes efficient serialization easy. If it's not easy, it's not useful because I already know how to do it the hard way.

The marketing has a point, by the way. It's an indication that there are people who are willing to put in effort to get others to adopt their tooling. That's a good indication that when I have a problem, that there will be somebody else who's willing to put in effort to help me. Given that I have zero budget to pay for support, that's important.

Thanks for the link, though. There's definitely some useful information there.

ANS.1 is pretty popular for introducing bugs, Estonia recently had to bin hundreds of thousands of ID cards due to an encoding mistake.

Integers being encoded as signed is a nightmare for cryptography, which makes no use of them.

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