cue VS edn

I'm continuing to work on https://concise-encoding.org which is a new security-conscious ad-hoc encoding format to replace JSON/XML and friends. I've been at it for 3 years so far and am close to a release.

In a nutshell:

- Edit in text, transmit in binary. One can be seamlessly converted to the other, but binary is far more efficient for processing, storage and transmission, while text is better for humans to read and edit (which happens far less often than the other things).

- Secure by design: Everything is tightly specced and accounted for so that there aren't differences between implementations that can be exploited to compromise your system. https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

- Real type support because coercing everything into strings sucks (and is another security risk and source of incompatibilities).

XML had a good run but was replaced by JSON which was a big improvement. JSON also had a good run but it's time for it to retire now that the landscape has changed even further: Security and efficiency are the desires of today, and JSON provides neither.

I've got the spec nailed down and can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel for the reference implementation in golang. I still need to come up with a system for schemas, but I'm hoping that https://cuelang.org will fit the bill.

Has anyone taken a look at Cue who can share any experiences?

https://cuelang.org/

It's mentioned on the site as an alternative to Yaml. Recently watched (~half of) this intro to it: https://youtu.be/fR_yApIf6jU

the most interesting summary explanation of cue lang and its differences is from a bug filing - https://github.com/cuelang/cue/issues/33

>CUE is a bit different from the languages used in linguistics and more tailored to the general configuration issue as we've seen it at Google. But under the hood it adheres strictly to the concepts and principles of these approaches and we have been careful not to make the same mistakes made in BCL (which then were copied in all its offshoots). It also means that CUE can benefit from 30 years of research on this topic. For instance, under the hood, CUE uses a first-order unification algorithm, allowing us to build template extractors based on anti-unification (see issue #7 and #15), something that is not very meaningful or even possible with languages like BCL and Jsonnet.

I agree with you. Personally, I think Cue is much better than either YAML, TOML or JSON because it adds the concept of types to the idea of describing configuration.

true, but the tooling and workflow remains the same.

Not sure of any tool that could abstract the details sufficiently to be widely adopted. There is just too much nuance in cloud config.

I'm exploring using CUE (https://cuelang.org) to define TF resources, exporting as JSON for TF. So far it's much nicer

> was utterly surprised how no one ever apparently has thought to create a configuration/templating system that's basically a fancy library on top of Scheme.

There's Clojure's extensible data notation: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

A thin language layer around edn/datalog, the query language

EDN (Extensible Data Notation) is a subset of Clojure: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

It is:

- Streamable

- Extensible

- Whitespace-insensitive, but there are formatting conventions for readability

To begin with, EDN is somewhat like the JSON of Clojure. And regarding the code is data/data is code nature of Clojure, it is Clojure. It doesn't have some of the vagaries of JSON, and it is also extensible.

Alien is not a reason something is bad, just that's it's unusual. JSON was a bit alien when it first arrived as well, as everyone was used to XML at the time.

`{num 5, val 4}` looks fine to me, but we can do even better! We already know objects/maps are always in pairs, so we don't really need that comma either. Just do `{num 5 val 4}` and we save yet another unnecessary characters.

Of course, I didn't come up with this format myself, what I actually want JSON to be is EDN (https://github.com/edn-format/edn) which is a standalone format but also directly used in Clojure, so it already exists inside a programming language and works very well. There keys are strings though, so you example would end up being `{"num" 5 "val" 5 "person" var}`, where commas are optional.

I just checked out the spec, and it gets pretty ugly in the Table section. A lot of the json examples are both shorter and IMO more precise. Stuff that’s not allowed with [table] is allowed with [[table]], and it’s confusing to understand what level of depth I’m at.

I’ll take edn over any of “em. https://github.com/edn-format/edn

As XT is written in Clojure and it natively supports Clojure’s data types, we were not satisfied with available JSON types and decided to give EDN a try - that way we would have way more supported types:

Compare the nightmare that is pickling with how simple it is to serialize pure data with edn in clojure. What ends up happening is people passing around JSONs or whatever and writing parsing/encoding code at each end, which makes things unnecessarily more complex, and dangerous, and error prone, and boring, etc...