I like Toml for my config files. Clear and simple format.

I've had good experiences on the JVM using HOCON [1].

[1]: https://github.com/lightbend/config/blob/b782a2d701fc2b04579...

YAML.

All the benefits of JSON with none of the negatives.

YAML is whitespace sensitive, that alone is a nightmare.

Yes, as someone who helps with some software with a YAML config, the whitespace issue has caused much time in IRC spent trading pastebins fixing these.

I agree overall YAML looks pretty nice, and consistent whitespace is a strong preference (I have pre-commit hooks), breaking user (if you have them) config if they don't know about this is an issue tho.

Do note that in addition to block collections, YAML also supports the flow collections of JSON, which are not whitespace sensitive. In fact, YAML 1.2 is a superset of JSON, and you can parse JSON with # comments as entirely valid YAML.

As someone who uses YAML and doesn't know it well (Thanks for nothing Docker & K8s) - I see absolutely zero difference between the two as far as one being better than the other goes, except the whitespace sensitivity which the other user mentioned, which really is a pain.

protobuffers now! protobuffers forever!

You doing stuff with multiple languages/frameworks?