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No. Neither. No.

It's the same as whitespace. You don't expect it to be round-trippable, it's just to make the source file easier to read. Likewise I would interpret any expectation of the preservation of comments the same as an expectation of the preservation of whitespace: weird, unreasonable, and probably arising from a misunderstanding of how JSON works.

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If an application stores its configuration in JSON, and I edit it by hand and leave a commented ‘// I did this because the other way was broken,’ then I open the application and change the configuration there … then I expect my comment to survive.

XML preserved whitespace, too! I dislike XML intensely, but there was a method to its madness. There’s a method to JSON, too: simplicity and usability.

You start adding things to JSON, you lose that.

Yeah. A round-trippable comment is just another text field. Leave that to the application.

It’s unfortunate how many APIs are documented with a single json example, but annotating them with comments (and maybe types?) would help immensely.

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