lua-patterns VS ron

If you want automatic built-in string validation, one option that seems particularly interesting is to use a variant of Lua patterns, which are weaker and easier to understand than regular expressions, but still provide a significant degree of "sanity" for something like an email. The original version works on bytes and not runes, but you could simply write a parser that works on runes instead, and the pattern-matching code is just 400 old and battle-tested lines of C89.

Lua patterns have also shown up in other places, such as BSD's httpd, and an implementation for Rust:

https://www.gsp.com/cgi-bin/man.cgi?section=7&topic=PATTERNS

https://github.com/stevedonovan/lua-patterns

http://lua-users.org/wiki/PatternsTutorial

Whenever this kind of arguments come up, I am sad that RON (https://github.com/ron-rs/ron) is not better known. To me it feels like a cleaner and better JSON.

In any case, my little experience with it had made me hate YAML. Generally speaking, I have come to dislike any language with significant whitespace other than Haskell.

Part of the reason why I migrated away from RON in system76-scheduler is because I needed to rely on the 253-untagged-enums branch from https://github.com/MomoLangenstein/ron. Which still isn't resolved today: https://github.com/ron-rs/ron/pull/451.

Serde is strongly, strictly typed: you have to specify what type you want to decode to. It’s nothing like Python’s Pickle protocol.

See, for example, https://github.com/ron-rs/ron/blob/484fcab0686dfd18c7e29b6c1..., where it (in a type-inferency way) says “parse as Config”.