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Why would it make more sense? You'd first have to sort the keys, then pretty print, then diff:

https://www.jvt.me/posts/2020/08/24/pretty-print-json-diff/

I'm also using a JSON-diff format in my data store[1], which is accumulated during insertions/updates/deletes in-memory and serialized during a commit, admittedly for large JSON instances (a few Gb and much more).

[1] https://github.com/sirixdb/sirix

> You'd first have to sort the keys

A lot of that comes down to internal application architecture. If you're working in Javascript / Typescript, where objects are inherently dictionaries / hashsets with ordering; yes, this is true. You will need to sort before serialization in order for the diff to be useful.

But: If you're working in a strongly-typed language like C# / Java / Rust / C++, and using an object -> JSON -> object serializer; the order of the elements is often quite explicit and never changes.

The backend doesn’t necessarily have exactly the same state as the fronted (think about multiple clients).

Textual diffs would only work if the starting point is guaranteed to be the same.

Is there a standard pretty print spec?