KEON is a human-readable Serde format that is syntactically similar to Rust

> But why?

It's literally in the README...

    • Less syntactic noise, more intuitive look.
    • Allow comments and trailing commas.
    • Write KEON almost like you write Rust:
        - Humanized optional type annotation.
        - Distinguishable between tuples and lists (seqs).
        - Arbitrary type as dictionary (map) keys.
        ...
    • Shorthand for newtypes.
    • Support use Base64, Base32 and Base16 to represent bytes.
    • Provide paragraphs may be helpful when writing something by hand.

JSON is pretty terrible. Its only real pro is the fact that it is widely used.

Because JSON is explicitly meant for machines only?

I know of one format that serde's system doesn't support well. D-Bus requires empty arrays to be aligned according to the type of their element, but serde's system has no way to tell the serializer any metadata about the type of an array element apart from giving it the array element to serialize. All the serializer gets to know that an array has started and then ended; it doesn't know anything about the element alignment unless it receives at least one element.

There is a sort of workaround - preload into the serializer what it is expected to serialize, eg by passing in the D-Bus signature string in the serializer ctor. But a) this is a somewhat unclean solution because everything other than arrays is redundant information that the serializer already gets from the serde::Serialize impl, and b) it's manual work for the user to have to specify this and easy to make a mistake and have the two get out of sync.

In my D-Bus library I decided to have my own Serializer setup as a workaround. serde's Deserializer setup still works though so that's not a problem.

This has just enough type information in the encoded form. You can do that in JSON too, by convention, of course. There's also an aesthetics argument. Idk, I think this is fine, and probably desirable in some contexts, but yes, it's an Nth system syndrome.

I think UCL is probably the best of all. Wish it had more than one implementation and formal specification.

I too am curious. I like Ron quite a bit for it's Rust similarity.

RON uses parentheses to represent structs. "This is not Rusty at all!", I thought to myself. This is where the story begins, a project written out of OCD. Eventually, KEON is different from RON in the following ways:

    - Use braces `{}` to represent structs and maps.

    - `macro_rules!` tells us, "`expr` and `stmt` may only be followed by one of: `=>`, `,`, or `;`". RON uses only `:` even though the left-hand can be arbitrary. KEON has added `=>`, now we have two ways to represent key-to-value. This is why structs and maps can be unified: structs can be regarded as maps with strings as keys. `ident: ...` is basically syntactic sugar for `"ident" => ...`.

    - Since parentheses are saved, we can use `()` to represent tuples and `[]` to represent vectors. Although they are all `seq` in Serde, in the output, this certainty reassures me: the length of a tuple is immutable relative to a vector.

    - Serde allows some weird structures, such as `struct AwfulNullary()`, which must `visit_tuple` rather than `visit_unit`. And `enum Foo { AwfulNullary() }`. Even though these never happened, I insisted on getting it sorted out.
        - In RON, both types output `AwfulNullary()` when showing struct names, and only the backend knows whether it is an enum or a struct, that's unsettling to me.
        - In KEON, pretty outputs `(AwfulNullary)()` and `Foo::AwfulNullary()`, or minimal outputs `()()` and `AwfulNullary()` respectively. You can tell what's going on at a glance.

    - Variants can be written anywhere as `Enum::Variant` or just `Variant`, exactly as happens in Rust. Redundant annotations help to quickly figure out what's there, and jump to the corresponding location without relying too much on LSP?

    - The type annotation of structs is done by `(TheStruct)`, like type conversions in C, implying the backend doesn't care what's in... If the parentheses were omitted, `TheStruct` would be treated as a variant in most places (refer to Turbofish), and I would not be able to write a usable parser at all. Although this isn't Rusty, it shouldn't be too obtrusive.

    - RON doesn't guarantee work with `deserialize_any` may have to do with these details. I believe KEON can support this, but more comprehensive tests are needed.

Some other less Rusty things:

    - `Option<T>` doesn't accept `visit_enum`, it only accepts `visit_some`/`none`. I didn't want to provide exceptions for `Some(..)` and `None`, so I had to find the question mark `?` from the keyboard for it to use.

    - Serde provides `visit_newtype_struct`, I think this *must* have its purpose, so we'd better have the corresponding syntactic sugar, that is `>`. Of course things like `Item::IdCard(101)` are also legal.

    - Raw strings. KEON uses Backtick-Quote instead of r-Pound-Quote. This is because, when I want to turn a string to a raw string, after selecting them, I can't wrap them by simply hitting `#` -- they will be directly overwritten, this annoys me. But Backtick can almost always automatically enclose the selection without worrying about ambiguity, requires less typing, and is just as intuitive.

    - Correspondingly, raw identifier uses Backtick instead of r-Pound.

    - Paragraphs, added purely out of preference. I wanted to try out how much handwriting would be benefited by providing this syntax for a language that is indent-insensitive.

    - BaseXX. Well, they're free.

I didn't expect that KEON would spark some interest. (Reply a bit late due to time difference :P)

(Edit: formatting)

I find it really straightforward until lifetimes are involved. I used Rust for a few weeks last January.

Some of this is just preference at the end of the day.

I find modern Typescript to be utter spaghetti and arguably worse at the points you’ve listed here.

Rust is extremely unreadable if you're not used to it, but becomes one of the most readable languages once you are. My subjective experience, at least.

Well this project isn't the full rust syntax, its just rust's object notation. I don't think its any harder to read than JSON.