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Comment by Uchikoma | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder with this kind of posts, is it minimalistic or is it an alternative?

The point is that it's written in language-du-jour and therefore fascinating and novel.

In fairness though, json will probably wind up being a common configuration format anyhow. And the idea of programmatically configurable system software is nice. I liked the Mongrel2 approach of having it in SQLite.

json is fine until your config system needs accurate numeric values.

Nothing in the json spec requires that numbers are limited to those internally representable in a javascript runtime. With the right tooling, you can encode/decode very accurate numeric values. I'm not familiar with the go libraries, but python's simplejson has a use_decimal flag that interprets floats using python's Decimal module.

That said, I can't think of any reason a web server needs super accurate numbers. All the config options I can think of require nice round ints. Maybe specifying weights to individual backends to proxy to (so all the weights sum up to 1.0)?

99% of sites are CRUD apps, but we're math heavy financial software. We store a lot of reference data in configuration for performance reasons. This needs to be decimal format.

JSON is a subset of the ECMA JavaScript standard which declares only floating point.

Do "100!" on wolfram alpha and find me a parser that will load that as an example.

works for me: https://gist.github.com/sirpengi/609711

I get a 404. ?

Bad copy pasta (missing 3 at the end): https://gist.github.com/sirpengi/6097113

or until someone wants to put in a comment that documents a change they made at 3am to a production system.

I think I would prefer toml take off as a config language.

Good point.

We use XML (still after 10 years). For all its warts, at least parsers and deserializers work properly.

It's technically an alternative, but since it performs worse and has less features you would probably never actually use it as an alternative.

It should probably be described as 'an easily embeddable and extendable(?) option for hosting your golang web app'.

just updated the title now

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