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On the one hand, this seems more real than a lot of promotion-ware I've seen: https://github.com/amazon-ion/ion-intellij-plugin#readme

On the other hand, they're not using this for the boto schemas, which seems like a natural place to show that it's able to capture real-world schemas so that makes it hard for me to think this has any traction

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The SDKs use Smithy[1] which is tailored for defining+generating services and SDKs, Ion is more of a pure data serialization format. It's definitely niche but my org uses it in a few places and it has some nice properties that fit our case pretty well (rapidly evolving schema, most clients only care about a small subset of attributes, ability to apply multiple and different schemas based on regions or businesses).

It's the sort of thing where I'd advise exploring other options first and only using it if the whys[2] really resonate with you because it definitely comes with some overhead.

[1] https://smithy.io/2.0/index.html [2] https://amazon-ion.github.io/ion-docs/guides/why.html

Ion is heavily used on the retail side of Amazon, but it's only recently started to appear in AWS products.

AWS is starting support PartiQL (https://partiql.org/) queries in some places and PartiQL uses Ion's type system internally.

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