Encoding disk headers into disk images

October 11, 2020

My first attempt at implementing disk image creation feels messy. Each type of header has a corresponding struct in the code base. When reading headers from a disk, populating a struct with their fields is an easy way to debug (in rust one can just [derive(Debug)] on the struct and print each field name/value pair). For generating headers for new disk images however, populating the header struct first then encoding it into a disk image file feels like redundant work. In particular, when some of the header fields are meant to contain a checksum of th remaining fields (as is the case in GPT headers), these fields can only be populated once the header is encoded as a byte array anyway. In such cases, I suspect I’ll have an easier time generating the byte array directly rather than going via a header struct.