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MIME types

Running revng artifact you will get a list of artifacts that can be produced along with their MIME types:

$ revng artifact
USAGE: revng-artifact [options] <artifact> <binary>

<artifact> can be one of:

  lift                        - application/x.llvm.bc+zstd
  isolate                     - application/x.llvm.bc+zstd
  enforce-abi                 - application/x.llvm.bc+zstd
  emit-cfg                    - text/yaml+tar+gz
  hexdump                     - text/x.hexdump+ptml
  render-svg-call-graph       - image/svg
  render-svg-call-graph-slice - image/svg
  disassemble                 - text/x.asm+ptml+tar+gz
  render-svg-cfg              - image/svg
  recompile                   - application/x-executable
  recompile-isolated          - application/x-executable
  simplify-switch             - application/x.llvm.bc+zstd
  make-segment-ref            - application/x.llvm.bc+zstd
  decompile                   - text/x.c+ptml+tar+gz
  decompile-to-single-file    - text/x.c+ptml
  emit-recompilable-archive   - application/x.recompilable-archive
  emit-helpers-header         - text/x.c+ptml
  emit-model-header           - text/x.c+ptml
  emit-type-definitions       - text/x.c+tar+gz
  cleanup-ir                  - application/x.llvm.bc+zstd
  emit-c                      - text/x.c+ptml+tar+gz
  emit-c-as-single-file       - text/x.c+ptml

MIME types#

When choosing MIME types for artifacts, we trying to conform as close as possible to RFC2045 and RFC6838.

There are two fundamental distinctions in MIME types:

  • text/*: the output can be opened in a text editor;
  • everything else: the output needs to be managed by an "external application";

The most common base MIME types we use are:

  • application/x-executable: an executable program.
  • application/x-object: an object file.
  • text/plain: a plain text file.
  • text/x.c: C source code (e.g., decompiled code).
  • text/x.asm: assembly code.
  • image/svg: an SVG image.
  • text/x.llvm.ir: LLVM IR in its textual representation.
  • application/x.llvm.bc: LLVM IR in its binary representation (also known as bitcode).
  • text/x.hexdump: an ASCII representation of raw bytes.
  • text/mlir: MLIR IR in its textual representation.
  • application/x.mlir.bc: MLIR IR in its bytecode representation.
  • text/x.yaml: a YAML dictionary, with one key for each function.

MIME types that are not text/* or image/svg will be transmitted over GraphQL via Base64 encoding

Some of these MIME types can be further wrapped in another format. To make this explicit, we add suffixes, specifically:

  • $PREFIX+ptml: $PREFIX is wrapped in PTML.
  • $PREFIX+tar: $PREFIX is wrapped in a tar file containing one file for each function.
  • $PREFIX+gzip: $PREFIX is compressed using gzip.

For instance: text/x.c+tar+gz means that the artifact is GZip-compressed tar archive, containing C code for each function in the binary. While, text/x.asm+ptml+tar+gz represents a GZip-compressed tar archive containing one file per function, which is in turn assembly code wrapped in PTML.