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Comment by zarzavat

3 years ago

We do, it’s called TOML. The future is here it’s just not equally distributed.

11 comments

zarzavat

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SPBS  3 years ago

TOML sucks for list of tables simply because they intentionally crippled inline tables to only be able to occupy one line. For ideology reasons ("we don't need to add a pseudo-JSON"). Unless your table is small, it's going to look absolutely terrible being all crammed into one line.

https://github.com/toml-lang/toml/issues/516

The official way to do list of tables is (look at how much duplication there is)

  [[main_app.general_settings.logging.handlers]]
    name = "default"
    output = "stdout"
    level = "info"

  [[main_app.general_settings.logging.handlers]]
    name = "stderr"
    output = "stderr"
    level = "error"

  [[main_app.general_settings.logging.handlers]]
    name = "access"
    output = "/var/log/access.log"
    level = "info"

vs

  handlers = [
    {
      name = "default",
      output =  "stdout",
      level = "info",
    }, {
      name = "stderr",
      output =  "stderr",
      level = "error",
    }, {
      name = "access",
      output =  "/var/log/access.log",
      level = "info",
    },
  ]

I would still reach for TOML first if I only needed simple key-value configuration (never YAML), but for anything requiring list-of-tables I would seriously consider JSON with trailing commas instead.

  • zarzavat  3 years ago

    I see the point and this is certainly a drawback of TOML but for me this is something of a boundary case between configuration and data.

    When configuration gets so complicated that the configuration starts to resemble structured data I tend to prefer to switch to a real scripting language and generate JSON instead.