All in all, it took about 2 days but I ended up with something very cool I think. Not only did I get that simple and clean interface I was looking for but I got a lot of additional advanced functionality as well. Full test suite, great docs, idomatic Dart, never hard to learn about C. I'm impressed.

Anyways, this is basically what I wanted to build. A nice clean interface that let's be go from Dart to CBOR, have it automatically handle all of the deterministic part of it for me and then back again to Dart. All without having to know anything about C or manual memory management.

At this point the tooling takes over, generates all the relevant binding code so that I now have typesafe Dart <-> C functions I can call essentially like I am just working with any other Dart code. I say essentially but the truth is that I know almost nothing about C & memory management.

Here is a quick code sample showing you how I am able to hook up the EverCBOR C library from @microsoft.com into my code so that the build tooling will automatically compile the relevant C code & expose it in my app. The second file is where I specify what C functions I want to call. That's it!

Building on top of this is some truly groundbreaking research from @microsoft.com who spent a lot of time and effort into launching a framework for generating verified secure parsers and formatters from domain-specific format specification languages. It was a huge deal in the cybersecurity community

In real life the problem is obviously more complicated than this but it's a good start all the same. I'm writing a server using @dart.dev and @kevmoo.com Shelf package to just intercept many of the most common bots before they can ever reach my site. Look how easy they make this.

I've been looking forward to this for a while now! I'm actually writing a bunch of server code at the moment implementing the endpoints for the browsers native Reporting API. w3c.github.io/reporting/