[Cbor] CDDL Codegen in production

[Sebastien Guillemot <[e-mail]>]

Hello all,

Background: most of you are familiar with RFC 8610
<https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8610> (CDDL). You may also be familiar with
the CDDL Ruby gem <https://rubygems.org/gems/cddl/versions/0.6.2> which can
be used to parse & validate CDDL. There is also a Rust tool
<https://github.com/anweiss/cddl> by Andrew Weiss that provides equivalent
functionality in Rust.

Our company (EMURGO) leveraged the work by Andrew to build a full Rust
codegen tool for CDDL that we called "cddl-codgen
<https://github.com/Emurgo/cddl-codegen>" where the output Rust code is
WASM-compatible. We then used this codegen tool on a CDDL file created by
one of our partners and generated a Rust library (link if you're curious
<https://github.com/Emurgo/cardano-serialization-lib>). This library
shipped to production last month and it's now being used by multiple
companies with a 6-digit number of end users running the library on their
devices thanks to the free & open source distribution of the whole stack.

There are still rough edges to our codegen library because some features of
CDDL don't work well with codegen (hopefully CDDL can improve this going
forward!), but overall this has been significantly easier for our company
to manage than having to hand-write CBOR parsing code every time our
partner updates their CDDL. We look forward to leveraging our CDDL-codgen
tool for other projects in the future.

I wanted to say thank you to everybody involved in the CDDL specification,
and if you have any questions about our library, don't hesitate to reach
out to me at [e-mail]


<https://twitter.com/sebastiengllmt>
<https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgFQ0hHuPO1QDcyP6t9KZTQ>
<https://t.me/emurgo>     <https://www.linkedin.com/company/emurgo_io/>
Sebastien Guillemot
Co-VP of Eng & Cardano PM
_______________________
 [e-mail]