BBQ: Better than raw!

What is this?

An archive format. Totally cool, with nice features and functionalities you aren't used to. Oh, and its small. libBBQ is a tiny library that only consists of so few files, but is able to handle many features and serve many purposes. Why am I making it? Well...

• libarchive is too large.
• libcanister lacks compression.
• zlib is confusing.
• lib7zip is Windows only.
• ... There is a myriad more.

BBQ is ment for general purpose use and is able to do cool things. And, you can append it to a binary, too! This way, you can save assets to your binary.

unix$ cat my.bbq >> mybin

Features

• Headers, headers, headers! No, not the ones you know. In fact, you can decide WHAT headers!
  • Add custom headers to any individual archive. Like author, version, or even base64 encoded data...up to you.
  • Read the data via the library or from a script via a command line tool.
• Streaming.
  • While the JSON is copied into memory, all the data is read as it goes on.
• Stick it at the end of something else.
  • The JSON is put at the bottom, and the file is hence read from the bottom instead than the top.
  • The data itself is resolved backwards too. The total archive size is added to the JSON so all files can be resolved - no matter where the archive is!

Example

The following is the JSON that is to be added to the archive.

{
    "headers": {
        "author": "My name",
        "some": "more"
    },
    "size": 1048576,
    "files": {
        "/foo.txt": { "start": 0, "end": 1024 },
        "/folder/bar.txt": { "start": 1025, "end": "..." }
    }
}

Development

This currently is only a PoC and will be worked into a proper program soon.