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Comment by kreco | Hacker News Reader

Can you tell me what was the context that lead you to create this?

Unrelated JSON experience:

I worked on a serializer which save/load json files as well as binary file (using a common interface).

From my own use case I found JSON to be restrictive for no benefit (because I don't use it in a Javascript ecosystem)

So I change the json format into something way more lax (optional comma, optional colon, optional quotes, multi line string, comments).

I wish we would stop pretending JSON to be a good human-readable format outside of where it make sense and we would have a standard alternative for those non-json-centric case.

I know a lot of format already exists but none really took off so far.

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Basically, for better or worse JSON is here to stay. It exists in all standard libraries. Swift's codec system revolves around it (it only handles types that are compatible with JSON).

It sucks, but we're stuck with JSON. So the idea here is to make it suck a little less by stopping all this insane text processing for data that never ever meets a human directly.

The progression I envisage is:

1. Dev reaches for JSON because it's easy and ubiquitous.

2. Dev switches to BONJSON because it's more efficient and requires no changes to their code other than changing the codec library.

3. Dev switches to a sane format after the complexity of their app reaches a certain level where a substantial code change is warranted.

Thanks for the details!

I'm in the JS ecosystem pretty regularly and "restrictive with no benefit" is the right description. I use JSON5 now when I have to, which greatly reduces the restrictions. I already have a build step so throwing in a JSON5 -> JSON converter is negligible.

As for FracturedJson, it looks great. The basic problem statement of "either minified and unreadable or prettified and verbose" isn't one I had put my finger on before, but now that it's been said I can't unsee it.

Have you heard of EDN? It's mostly used in Clojure and ClojureScript, as it is to Clojure what JSON is to JS.

If you need custom data types, you can use tagged elements, but that requires you to have functions registered to convert the data type to/from representable values (often strings).

It natively supports quite a bit more than JSON does, without writing custom data readers/writers.

https://github.com/edn-format/edn

I haven't, but it's an interesting format for sure.

I've found a more comprehensive documentation here. [1]

At first glance, I would say it's a bit more complex that it should for a "human readable" format.

[1] https://edn-format.dev/

Another thing to possibly consider would be ASN.1 (you can also use the nonstandard extensions that I made up, called ASN.1X, if you want some of the additional types I included such as a key/value list). (You are not required to implement or use all of the types or other features of ASN.1 in your programs; only use the parts that you use for your specific application.) Unlike EDN, ASN.1 has a proper byte string type, it is not limited to Unicode, it has a clearly defined canonical form (DER, which is probably the best format (and is the format used by X.509 certificates); BER is too messy), etc. DER is a binary format (and the consistent framing of different types in DER makes it easier to implement and work with than the formats that use inconsistent framing, although that also makes it less compact); I made up a text format called TER, which is intended to be converted to DER.

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