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Re:The Nimble File Format by Meta by jgarzik on Thursday April 25, 2024 @06:14PM (#40163738)
Where is the file format specification?

I would prefer to write a parser with zero dependencies.

Re:The Nimble File Format by Meta by SonOfLilit on Thursday April 25, 2024 @06:22PM (#40163821)
They strongly discourage you.

Unified: More than a specification, Nimble is a product. We strongly discourage developers to (re-)implement Nimble’s spec to prevent environmental fragmentation issues observed with similar projects in the past. We encourage developers to leverage the single unified Nimble library, and create high-quality bindings to other languages as needed.

Re:The Nimble File Format by Meta by jgarzik on Thursday April 25, 2024 @06:41PM (#40163981)
Sigh. I get more than enough of that in the blockchain world.

Call me a greybeard; I want multiple implementations and a spec.

Re:The Nimble File Format by Meta by hi-v-rocknroll on Thursday April 25, 2024 @08:44PM (#40164757)
A spec. There is no substitute for it. Code isn't a spec. A spec is documentation that describes a format and/or operation. The absence of it is laziness and/or arrogance.
Re:The Nimble File Format by Meta by zzulus on Thursday April 25, 2024 @08:52PM (#40164803)
Some dudes worked hard to create this thing and open source it, and here you are calling them lazy and/or arrogant.

On the other hand - it's an open source project, I hope someone can contribute to it and create a PR with the spec.

Re:The Nimble File Format by Meta by hi-v-rocknroll on Friday April 26, 2024 @01:08AM (#40166119)
The outrage! The vague feelings of people I don't know taking things out of context may survive. If not, I'll bring them soup.

There are some unfortunately popular projects like Puppet over the past 20 years who tried to sell the lack of documentation as a positive, or just had incomplete and outdated documentation like Chef. ;] On the flip side, IETF RFCs, Python PEPs, and Rust RFCs are examples where specifications made things clearer and open to everyone. It's not enough to open source a thing without context or comments, the learning curve must be accounted for to make it as self-service and understandable as possible to people who have domain knowledge but have never used this particular thing before. OOTBE UX. Code maybe a communication of intended system behavior, but it is often too low-level and spread around to be relied upon as a singular, compact reference.

Re:The Nimble File Format by Meta by SonOfLilit on Saturday April 27, 2024 @05:38AM (#40178659)
To be clear, I agree with you (and my beard is kinda graying). Just pointing out that they don't.
Re:The Nimble File Format by Meta by karmakaze on Friday April 26, 2024 @12:07AM (#40165868)
Why not instead make a test suite of inputs and expected pass/fail for validation of implementations.

It's not more than a specification if a single implementation is to be used--then it's a 'spec' defined by the implementation because any idiosyncrasies of that implementation become defacto specification.

Re:The Nimble File Format by Meta by yencabulator on Friday April 26, 2024 @07:28AM (#40168064)
Untrusted file parsing in C++ is not how many people wish to roll in 2024.