A while ago I wrote about building a minimal ELF64 parser from scratch — mostly because I didn’t want to bring libelf or GPL into a tiny tool. That post explored the motivation behind the project and the early steps of parsing ELF headers by hand.
Now, that project — libMiniELF — has reached version 1.0.0.
What it does
libMiniELF is a lightweight C++17 library for reading ELF64 files. It provides:
- Parsing of ELF headers, section headers, and symbols
- Address-to-symbol resolution (exact and nearest match)
- A small CLI tool
dump_elffor inspection - MIT license, zero dependencies
The goal isn’t to replicate the full power of libelf, but to provide a clean and embeddable core for system-level tools, profilers, and static analysis utilities.
Why I built it
I needed a fast, dependency-free way to:
- Extract symbol names from binaries
- Map instruction pointers to function names
- Walk ELF structures for tooling purposes
Most existing solutions were either too heavy, too tied to GPL, or over-engineered for what I needed. So I wrote my own.
What’s changed since the early post
- Fully working CLI interface:
dump_elf <binary>with multiple subcommands - Accurate symbol parsing, including
mainand nearest resolution - Section offset lookup with binary search
- Clean and tested C++17 API
- Versioned releases starting with
1.0.0
What’s next
- DWARF support in a separate library (
libTinyDWARF) - Stack snapshot + function name resolution
- Integration with real-time visualization tools
- More examples and documentation
Link
GitHub: trianmon/libMiniELF
If you're working on binary inspection, trace tools, or just like lean C++ code — feedback is welcome!
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