This sort of code (for, you know, Wrangling Untrusted File Formats Safely) should be written in WUFFS. The nice thing about WUFFS for this specific problem is

This sort of code (for, you know, Wrangling Untrusted File Formats Safely) should be written in WUFFS. The nice thing about WUFFS for this specific problem is that although it's an entirely safe language† and is exactly the right way to do this, it also transpiles to C, so you can do the "Write file format code" stuff in WUFFS, transpile to C and then just land both in the kernel source. [You might wonder: Why both? Surely the C is enough? No, the GNU GPL says you should provide preferred form for modification and clearly the preferred form for this code is WUFFS source not C, the provided C is just so that people don't need the WUFFS transpiler to build Linux if that's what they're doing] † Entirely safe here meaning these mistakes won't even compile in WUFFS.