go-concise-encoding VS Task

I'm not sure, TBH... Maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment?

I'm currently partway through refactoring all of the portable unit tests for Concise Encoding ( https://github.com/kstenerud/go-concise-encoding/tree/master... ) and it is a SLOG! I mean, so goddamn boring and tedious that I wanna stick an ice pick through my skull. There's easily another 200 hours of this terrible work ahead and I'll be right back to it the moment Dogma v1 is published in a few weeks (Dogma has been kind of a vacation from it in a lot of ways).

Do I dread it? Yes. Am I still going to do it? Yes. Because at the end of the day I want to be able to stand back and say "I made that. I completed it - ALL of it. It's not perfect, but it's doing its job and people are using it."

It's still in the prerelease stage, but v1 will be released later this year. I'm mostly getting hits from China since they tend to be a lot more worried about security. I expect the rest of the world to catch on to the gaping security holes of JSON and friends in the next few years as the more sophisticated actors start taking advantage of them. For example https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

There are still a few things to do:

- Update enctool (https://github.com/kstenerud/enctool) to integrate https://cuelang.org so that there's at least a command line schema validator for CE.

- Update the grammar file (https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/tree/master/an...) because it's a bit out of date.

- Revamp the compliance tests to be themselves written in Concise Encoding (for example https://github.com/kstenerud/go-concise-encoding/blob/master... but I'll be simplifying the format some more). That way, we can run the same tests on all CE implementations instead of everyone coming up with their own. I'll move the test definitions to their own repo when they're done and then you can just submodule it.

I'm thinking that they should look more like:

    c1

I'll be working on the reference implementation [1] of Concise Encoding [2], which is a secure data format for the modern world. My aim is to replace insecure and clunky formats like JSON and XML and the various binary formats that do similar things less conveniently.

In a nutshell:

- Existing ad-hoc formats are too loosely defined to be secure, and that's becoming a huge problem as the bad guys become more sophisticated. CE is tightly specified and designed to mitigate exploitation of codecs.

- CE is a twin text and binary format. Humans view and edit in text, and machines send it in binary, so you get the convenience of text and the efficiency of binary for free.

- CE supports the fundamental types natively. Stringifying is buggy, causes incompatibilities, and opens security holes. And it's completely unnecessary with a properly designed data format.

[1] https://github.com/kstenerud/go-concise-encoding

[2] https://concise-encoding.org/

I'm building a general-purpose data format for the modern age. The old ones are too bulky, too insecure, and too limiting.

* Secure: As a tightly specified format, Concise Encoding doesn't suffer from the security problems that the more loosely defined formats do. Everything is done one way only, leaving less of an attack surface.

* Efficient: As a twin binary/text format, Concise Encoding retains the text-based ease-of-use of the old text formats, but is stored and transmitted in the simpler and smaller binary form, making it more secure, easier on the energy bill, and easier on the planet.

* Versatile: Supports all common types natively. 90% of users won't need any form of customization.

* Future-proof: As a versioned format, Concise Encoding can respond to a changing world without degenerating into deprecations and awkward encodings or painting itself into a corner.

* Plug and play: No extra compilation steps or special description formats or crazy boilerplate.

https://concise-encoding.org

Reference implementation (golang): https://github.com/kstenerud/go-concise-encoding

One thing golang did right is the go playground. When I put code in my README, I also include a playground link.

Example: https://github.com/kstenerud/go-concise-encoding#library-usa...

I could use some help if you're interested in implementing an ad-hoc data format codec in different languages.

https://concise-encoding.org is nearing release, but building the reference implementation (https://github.com/kstenerud/go-concise-encoding) has taken so much of my spare time that I couldn't even think about other languages (especially since I'll need to focus on the schema format next, and the proto-RPC protocol after that).

I've started doing this in my larger projects e.g. https://github.com/kstenerud/go-concise-encoding/blob/master...

An architecture document should be the code equivalent of a combined street map and tourist guide. Its purpose is to bring strangers up to a minimum level of familiarity with the code as quickly as possible. That includes where things are, why it was architected this way, things to look out for, and a few interesting points of weirdness perhaps.

Concise Encoding: https://concise-encoding.org

The friendly data format for human and machine. Think JSON, but with 1:1 compatible twin binary and text formats and rich type support.

* Edit text, transmit binary. Humans love text. Machines love binary. With Concise Encoding, conversion is 1:1 and seamless.

* Rich type support. Boolean, integer, float, string, bytes, time, URI, UUID, list, map, markup, metadata, etc.

* Plug and play. No schema needed. No special syntax files. No code generation. Just import and go.

I'm in the process of finishing up the reference implementation (https://github.com/kstenerud/go-concise-encoding), after which I'll start on the schema specification. Once that's done, I have a low-level communication protocol that will use this format under the hood.

So many tools in this space! This one looks a little bit like go-task, but it seems maybe better for production workflows because if timeout support, while go-task seems more aimed to command line work/makefile replacement.

—-

https://github.com/go-task/task

View on GitHub

A similar tool is `task` https://taskfile.dev/ . It is quite capable and also a single executable. I've grown to quite like it.

check out tasks - a bit of a learning curve but arguably more powerful imo

That's when I came across taskfile.dev. Task is an automation tool designed to be more accessible than other options, such as GNU Make.

Full disclosure, I did not review Conda or Hatch fully. Not that there is anything explicitly wrong with either of them. Conda is too specific to the scientific community for my general taste. Hatch seems to go well with Conda and also uses the PyProject manifest as well. It's nice that it gives you several built in tools, similar to commit hooks, but I tend to like to roll my own via a Taskfile and run them with Poetry.

Taskfile is a tool for streamlining repetitive development tasks. It helps automate activities like building, testing, and deploying applications. Unlike Makefile, Taskfile uses YAML for configuration, making it more readable and user-friendly.

9. We test everything with another promotion which runs make targets which build docker containers to run python scripts (pytest)

This is also built by a complicated web of wildcarded makefile targets, which need to be interoperable and support a few if/else cases for specific components.

My plan is to migrate all of this to something simpler and more straightforward, or at least more maintainable, which is honestly probably going to turn into taskfile[0] instead of makefiles, and then simple python scripts for the glue that ties everything together or does more complex logic.

My hope is that it can be more straightforward and easier to maintain, with more component-ized logic, but realistically every step in that labyrinthine build process (and that's just the open-source version!) came from a decision made by a very talented team of engineers who know far more about the process and the product than I do. At this point I'm wondering if it would make 'more sense' to replace it with a giant python script of some kind and get access to all the logic we need all at once (it would not).

[0] https://taskfile.dev/

task - a task runner and a replacement for make