I didn’t mean to say LTE is deliberately complex, compared to older specs it’s very simple. I was thinking more of ASN.1 itself which even in later editions add

I didn’t mean to say LTE is deliberately complex, compared to older specs it’s very simple. I was thinking more of ASN.1 itself which even in later editions added features that only made the parsing and codegen harder, though they made authoring simpler. Specifically I was looking asn1c but IIRC it could not handle parameterization used in S1AP - maybe 3 years ago? It might have changed right after I tried, I didn’t follow it up and took a different route. I think we agree, the problem is worsened when you need to support multiple ASN.1 protocols, including MEGACO, S1AP, RANAP, H.323, GSM MAP, TCAP etc - you need a tool that provides a stable and unified API for all protocols. And if you want that, today you still have to pay for it or struggle with multiple tools with different APIs. Don’t get me wrong I like ASN.1 very much. Text based protocols (esp. over TCP) have caused me more headaches than ASN.1 and ad-hoc binaries protocols combined. HTTP/2 is worth it just for ditching text. The rest of it is just icing :-)