json5 VS jk

JSON5 support

Meanwhile, formats have been evolving (JSON5, YAML), config entry points are constantly changing. These fluctuations, fortunately, were covered by tools like the cosmiconfig.

I think JSON5 is fairly close to this: https://json5.org

I reckon the only thing it's missing to be truly accessible to non-techies is that string values still need to be quoted, i.e. you can't have:

key: this is my value

(I'm definitely not saying it would be a good idea to allow quotes to be dropped, just that that's the only potential stumbling block I see for non-techies.)

I believe that's JSON5.

https://github.com/json5/json5

It's my preferred configuration file format, it fixes all the problems I have with JSON (trailing commas, comments) without turning it into a mess full of gotchas like YAML.

JSON 5 support

I would like to see mention of JSON5 which is 11 years its elder. For comments in JSON, JSON5 is a good starting point.

People have tried: https://github.com/jkcfg/jk

But yeah I agree. The thing is, if all you need is robust determinism why do you need a full functional language with currying and other complex concepts?

Google had the same problem for Bazel, and their solution (Starlark) is way easier to understand.

If I were writing a build system today (and I did just write one actually to test out some ideas) I would use Typescript for the language with something like jk to provide hermeticity. Typescript has many advantages, especially over Python, but mainly:

It's possible to sandbox most languages, and with some work you can probably make them deterministic too.

Here's an example: https://github.com/jkcfg/jk

That beats having to learn an entirely new language.

Maybe Javascript? A lot of web tools support Javascript config files. There's this nice-looking effort to provide a hermetic execution environment for them: https://github.com/jkcfg/jk and if you use Typescript you get an extremely good static type system too. Plus the language is already very well known with loads of tool support and documentation.

Definitely what I would use today.

If you think "but I need conditionals and file inclusion and ..." then maybe consider just allowing a full programming language instead. Someone pointed me to jk which looks like it is heading in the right direction, except that it outputs YAML by default for some insane reason.

You may be interested in jk. If you don't want to use a special purpose configuration language (jsonnet, cue, dhall, etc), this is a nice alternative that uses js in a hermetic runtime (but see their open issues for progress on that). They seem to also be adding native typescript support so you could even have type checking built-in.