Re:MessagePack: like JSON, but fast and small
by iainmerrick on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @08:54AM
(#22545365)
What are the alternatives?
Even though it’s not ideal, I actively prefer JSON over every other random format I’ve come across. This is speaking as somebody who mostly has to tweak existing configs, rather than extending them or writing new ones.
YAML (along with I guess TOML etc) looks nice at first glance, but it has too many weird syntax shortcuts that make it hard to figure out what’s actually going on. And googling for syntax like “[ ]” is hard!
With JSON, the data model is super simple, and for a given set of data there’s only one way to write it down. Sometimes the data model is too simple, sure. But even for fiddly cases like dates and times, there’s often an obvious solution (in this case, ISO 8601 strings).
Re:MessagePack: like JSON, but fast and small
by Zarel on Thursday March 12, 2020 @11:32AM
(#22557880)
JSON5 is a good alternative, mentioned a few times in this thread. JSON, plus comments, trailing commas, and object keys can be unquoted. Solves all my frustration with using JSON as a config file language.
Re:MessagePack: like JSON, but fast and small
by iainmerrick on Thursday March 12, 2020 @03:18PM
(#22560659)
Wow, I hadn’t heard of this before, even after reading other replies to this post! Looks pretty nice, hits just about every point on my personal wishlist. I’m going to use this.
That's just tooling compensating for the shortcomings of a format being shoehorned into a use-case that falls outside of it's scope.
It's the XML nonsense all over again.
> It's better done and more mainstream than any other solution I've seen compared to people saying "well technically you could build that for <pet format>."
That's the same short-sighted line of argument that was used to force the mistake of using XML everywhere.
There are right tools for the right job. JSON os the right tool for a lot of jobs, but config files is not one of them.