Consider this an informal guide to reading the Solana snapshot format. This guide is written for Solana Labs versions v1.14 through v1.17.
You are probably reading this because you want to read the accounts in a snapshot without going through the pain of interfacing with the Solana Labs codebase.
We assume general familiarity with the Solana ledger.
Zig aims to be a simple language. It is not easy to define what simple exactly means, but zig is also a low-level programming language that aims for c-compatibility. To reach this goal, it needs good semantics in its type system so that developers have a complete toolbox to manipulate data.
So types in zig are composable, but this can become rapidly overwhelming. See those examples. Are you able to understand them at a glance, as soon as you read them?
*const ?u8
?*const u8
*const [2]u8
Run zig test guids.zig. With use_std_guid = false takes about 12 seconds on my machine, with use_std_guid = true it takes about 6 minutes.