babashka VS ndjson.github.io

I've been learning Clojure recently and loving it, but one thing I've found myself missing from my Golang days is how easy it is to build and deploy CLI tools in Golang.

With GraalVM it's finally possible to compile Clojure apps into static binaries that give your users a deploy and startup experience similar to Go's, but I found GraalVM very difficult to configure and use, and was often frustrated because not all JVM code is compatible with GraalVM. Worse still, because native-images take a while to build you often don't find out that your working JVM Clojure code won't work as a native-image until it's too late.

BabashkaBins/bbb is my attempt to fix this: it lets you easily run the same codebase under babashka or JVM Clojure, and will automate compiling your project to a static binary for you using GraalVM's native-image. It also takes care of collecting some tweaks that make it easy to use the cli-magic [2] library under babashka, which means you can easily make complex CLI tools with nested subcommands a la git or docker, with all the bells and whistles.

Since babashka is itself compiled under GraalVM, this arrangement provides a other few nice benefits: 1) babashka starts quickly, so you can test your CLI from an actual command line without waiting for the JVM to spin up each time. 2) babashka's codebase contains a treasure trove of GraalVM related tweaks and fixes that using bbb lets you take advantage of in your own CLIs for free, and 3) it functions as a quick sanity check since babashka itself is compiled under GraalVM. If you find yourself doing something that's not GraalVM compatible at least you'll know early!

[1]: https://github.com/borkdude/babashka

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[1]: https://github.com/borkdude/babashka

However, since every JSON document can be represented in a single line, something like newline-delimited JSON / JSON Lines feels like it would've been more suitable for that kind of data.

No one uses that format for streamed json, see ndson and jsonl

http://ndjson.org/

The size complaint is overblown, as repeated fields are compressed away.

As other folks rightfully commented, csv is a mine field. One should assume every CSV file is broken in some way. They also don't enumerate any of the downsides of CSV.

What people should consider is using formats like Avro or Parquet that carry their schema with them so the data can be loaded and analyzed without have to manually deal with column meaning.

What is ndjson? Newline delimited JSON is the format the Algolia CLI reads from and writes to files. This means that any command that passes ndjson formatted data as output or accepts it as input can be piped together with an Algolia CLI command! We’ll see more of this in the next example

You might consider using json-lines format (also known as newline-delimited JSON), in which each line is a separate JSON document so they can be loaded individually.

The format you're getting is known as Newline-Delimited JSON. Instead of trying to parse the whole input and pass that to the JSON Decoder, you can use something like bufio.Scanner to get and parse it line by line.

This is in oposition to NDJSON, which allows to split records without deserializing JSON itself, via e.g. read_lines. fwiw CSV suffers from the same problem as JSON - generally not possible to break into records without deserializing. It is worse than NDJSON because the character \n may appear at any position within an item, thus forbidding read_lines.

I've always seen it referred to as ndjson

I think this would be fine, as long as the CSV layer was still parsable using the RFC 4180, then you could still use a normal CSV parser to parse the CSV layer and a normal JSON parser to parse the JSON layer. My worry with your example is that it is nether format, so it will need custom serialisation and deserialisation logic as it is essentially a bran new format.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4180

If you’re looking for line-oriented JSON, another option would be ndjson: http://ndjson.org/