Comment by kreco
6 hours ago
Can you tell me what was the context that lead you to create this?
Unrelated JSON experience:
I worked on a serializer which save/load json files as well as binary file (using a common interface).
From my own use case I found JSON to be restrictive for no benefit (because I don't use it in a Javascript ecosystem)
So I change the json format into something way more lax (optional comma, optional colon, optional quotes, multi line string, comments).
I wish we would stop pretending JSON to be a good human-readable format outside of where it make sense and we would have a standard alternative for those non-json-centric case.
I know a lot of format already exists but none really took off so far.
Have you heard of EDN? It's mostly used in Clojure and ClojureScript, as it is to Clojure what JSON is to JS.
If you need custom data types, you can use tagged elements, but that requires you to have functions registered to convert the data type to/from representable values (often strings).
It natively supports quite a bit more than JSON does, without writing custom data readers/writers.
https://github.com/edn-format/edn
Basically, for better or worse JSON is here to stay. It exists in all standard libraries. Swift's codec system revolves around it (it only handles types that are compatible with JSON).
It sucks, but we're stuck with JSON. So the idea here is to make it suck a little less by stopping all this insane text processing for data that never ever meets a human directly.
The progression I envisage is:
1. Dev reaches for JSON because it's easy and ubiquitous.
2. Dev switches to BONJSON because it's more efficient and requires no changes to their code other than changing the codec library.
3. Dev switches to a sane format after the complexity of their app reaches a certain level where a substantial code change is warranted.
Thanks for the details!