Comment by hnlmorg

Since we are nitpicking, git is considerably older than TOML, and nearly as old as YAML and JSON. In fact JSON wasn’t even standardised until after git’s first stable release.

Back then there wasn’t a whole lot of options besides rolling their own.

And when you also consider that git had to be somewhat rushed (due to Linux kernel developers having their licenses revoked for BitKeeper) and the fact that git was originally written and maintained by Linus himself, it’s a little more understandable that he wrote his own config file parser.

Under the same circumstances, I definitely would have done that too. In fact back then, I literally did write my own config file parsers.