Hacker News Reader

Not only that, but JSON library perf is hilariously variable.

I feel you, but one problem is that it is often hard to rank libraries best to worst. 20 may be a bit much, but still -- one library may be the most popular, another fastest, another correctly handles this one specific unusual case, another works well with large objects, another has more convenient interface for your case, etc.

What would be ideal is if there was useful information about such things available right on the aggregator site -- Amazon style reviews wouldn't be too useful here tbh, ideally one would like to see multiple comparisons from people like you who tried or at least looked at a few of them.

Yes! This is exactly what I expected from the website.

I use github to figure this out by perusing the issues and history.

Your problems, if common enough, suggest a startup opportunity to address this area - on a paid basis. Testing validation / curation of various software libraries and tools for various languages, with comments and ratings about suitability for various purposes, and along different dimensions, such as code quality, performance, docs, etc.

There was a company in a roughly similar area (IIRC) called SpikeSource, co-founded by (?) Kim Polese of Sun and later Marimba. Not checked recently about them.

> So I had to either rewrite the code to use another library or give up on SteamAPI.

You could have fixed the bug yourself instead. Parsing JSON is not exactly rocket science.

I looked at the code... writing my own parser would be faster than fixing it. But that's beside the point. I decided to use a 3rd party library because I did not want to invest my time into that. The moment I had to even look at the source code, that was broken.

Surely thats the 'cost' of using someone elses' work without paying for it/otherwise remunerating the author? Its hardly their fault you found a bug that you decided you couldn't/wouldn't fix ..

I'm not blaming the author. I'm just saying that picking a random library is a bad idea.

But surely, the moment you integrate the random library into your project, you assumed responsibility for it - warts and all? I just can't see the moral authority that you've granted yourself to complain about the library and the effort required to continue to maintain it, when it clearly was of advantage to you to integrate it into your project in the first place .. Don't you think it was a privilege that some stranger wrote code that you used in your project, in spite of the thorns?

> I just can't see the moral authority

You completely took that out of the context. I wrote about it to show how risky it is to pick a random library, not to complain about the author.

> But surely, the moment you integrate the random library into your project, you assumed responsibility for it.

No, you don't. Your only responsibility is your project. If the library is broken, and the original author doesn't want to fix it, it's time to evaluate whether it's easier to remove it, replace it with something else or fix it yourself. You are not obliged to fix it yourself at all. I'm sorry to disappoint you, but the world doesn't work that way.

Alas, you and I simply disagree. I wager that full responsibility for ones project implies the onus of fixing whatever problems you introduce into the project by importing the external dependency in the first place.

Were you my junior, telling this to me as your project manager, I'd demand you fix the bug. The reason is - we already gained from your decision to advance the project by including the external work, and at the moment you included it in your project you accepted responsibility for the issue. Failing to take responsibility for this code, whether you wrote it or not, would be a major distraction from the task, and thus does not reflect positively on you as a developer...

I'm so glad I'm not your junior then. I prefer to work at companies who actually ship products instead of going around fixing 3rd party bugs.

So you're okay with 3rd-party features, which you willingly import into your project and utilize to make your job easier, but you're not okay with taking responsibility for any bugs in those 3rd-party libraries. Doesn't make any sense. I'm glad you're not my junior, too.

Out of curiosity, what JSON library was that?

JsonBox:

https://github.com/anhero/JsonBox

To give some credit to libhunt.com, they don't even list it :)

It's good that you opened up an issue for it, but it also looks like he was waiting for more information from you...

https://github.com/anhero/JsonBox/issues/35

As you can see, I gave a link to the problematic .json file. If I were a developer of the library, this would be enough for me. I have made and maintained open source projects (see my bio on HN) and I have often got less to work with (people just explaining the problem without even giving me a data sample).

He was asking me to drill it down and basically debug his program and I simply wasn't interested in doing that.

That's not that much different in Java or Scala either. So many libraries that do JSON.