jsonslicer VS murex

> JSON’s design assumes the user can read the entire file into memory

No? The design of most JSON libraries assumes that, but there are perfectly good incremental JSON parsers out there[1–3]. It’s just that people don’t seem to have figured out a good API for not-completely-incremental parsing (please prove me wrong here!), but this applies equally to any structured data format as soon as you want to pull out pieces of data that are nested more than one level down.

The lack of length prefixes in JSON does indeed make a solid parser somewhat more difficult, but you get the ability to author and validate it manually instead. All in all a draw and not because of the incremental parsing thing.

(Tabular or otherwise homogeneous data is indeed reprsented wastefully, but unless the individual records are huge json+gzip is a perfectly serviceable “worse-is-better” solution.)

[1] https://github.com/ICRAR/ijson

[2] https://github.com/AMDmi3/jsonslicer

[3] https://github.com/danielyule/naya

This is how murex works too https://github.com/lmorg/murex/blob/master/config/defaults/p...

I agree. I’ve written about this before but this is what murex (1) does. It reimplements some of coreutils where there are benefits in doing so (eg sed, grep etc -like parsing of lists that are in formats other than flat lines of text. Such as JSON arrays)

Mutex does this by having these utilities named slightly different to their POSIX counterparts. So you can use all of the existing CLI tools completely but additionally have a bunch of new stuff too.

Far too many alt shells these days try to replace coreutils and that just creates friction in my opinion.

1. https://murex.rocks

This is exactly what Murex shell does. It has lots of builtin tools for querying structured data (of varying formats) but also supports POSIX pipes for using existing tools like `jq` et al seamlessly too.

https://murex.rocks

Stable is a problem because a lot of these shells don’t offer any guarantees for breaking changes.

My own shell, https://github.com/lmorg/murex is committed to backwards compatibility but even here, there are occasional changes made that might break backwards compatibility. Though I do push back on such changes as much as possible, to the extent that most of my scripts from 5 years ago still run unmodified.

This is similar to how my shell works. It still just passes bytes around but additionally passes information about how those bytes could be interpreted. A schema if you will. So it works as cleanly with POSIX / GNU / et al tools as it does with fancy JSON, YAML, CSV and other document formats.

It basically sits somewhere between Powershell and Bash: typed pipelines like Powershell but without sacrificing familiarity with all the CLI commands you already use day in and day out.

https://github.com/lmorg/murex

As an aside, I’m about to drop a massive update in the next few days that will make the shell even more intuitive to use.