realworld VS concise-encoding

View on GitHub

So what would be a better benchmark? Perhaps a "standard" "real world" app, like https://github.com/gothinkster/realworld

Or something simpler?

RealWorld example app is a full-stack application called "Conduit" that consists of a backend that serves JSON API and a frontend UI. There are numerous implementations for different languages and frameworks, but in this tutorial you will be using the Spring backend and the React frontend.

Github has millions of projects, some large fraction with more than 100 stars, so it doesn't seem like you are searching very hard. But more importantly, why "100 stars"? Stars are meaningless and arbitrary. Many developers use stars like bookmarks. I just did a quick search and noticed a project like realworld (just a demo for learning, 65 contributors) has have more stars than Bitcoin (900+ developers, perhaps you have heard of it?)

Here’s a roster of implementations for the same basic app https://github.com/gothinkster/realworld in a variety of frameworks. While you’re at it, it might be worthwhile showcasing Kobweb. There are a couple of entries for Kotlin.

"Local time" is time zone metadata. I've written a fair bit about timekeeping, because the context of what you're capturing becomes very important: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

This is basically why I ended up rolling my own text date format for Concise Encoding: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...

ISO 8601 and RFC 3339 are fine for dates in the past, but they're not great as a general time format.

It's to scratch a personal itch of mine: formal descriptions of binary data formats. I couldn't find anything suitable for describing the binary format for Concise Encoding (https://concise-encoding.org/), so I did the crazy thing, thinking "how hard could it be?" But it worked out and I have a formal description for it now:

* https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/cb...

* https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...

So it's primarily geared towards documentation. That being said, there's no reason why tools couldn't use it as well (I'm trying to keep it consistent enough that tools could be built).

Error handling would be an implementation detail. The spec only describes what counts as a malformed grammar, and what counts as an ambiguous grammar (and a small bit about undefined behaviour, which counts as ambiguous).

This looks similar to https://concise-encoding.org/

Dogma was developed as a consequence of trying to describe Concise Binary Encoding. The CBE spec used to look like the preserves binary spec, full of hex values, tables and various ad-hoc illustrations: https://preserves.dev/preserves-binary.html

Now the CBE formal description looks like this: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/cb...

And the regular documentation looks like this: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/cb...

Dogma also does text formats (Concise Encoding has a text and binary format, so I needed a metalanguage that could do both in order to make it less jarring for a reader):

https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...

https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...

Hey thanks for taking the time to critique!

I actually do have an ANTLR file that is about 90% of the way there ( https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/tree/master/an... ), so I could use those as a basis...

One thing I'm not sure about is how to define a BNF rule that says for example: "An identifier is a series of characters from unicode categories Cf, L, M, N, and these specific symbol characters". BNF feels very ASCII-centric...

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

It's weird... I was never big on writing, but when I finally tried my hand at a data format specification (https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding), I found that I really enjoyed the experience.

It's 3000 lines and took me four years and countless revisions, but I feel it was worth it. I actually enjoyed writing the spec even more than writing the reference implementation :)

Ugh Unicode has been the bane of my existence trying to write a text format spec. I started by trying to forbid certain characters to keep files editable and avoid Unicode rendering exploits (like hiding text, or making structured text behave differently than it looks), but in the end it became so much like herding cats that I had to just settle on https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...

Basically allow everything except some separators, most control chars, and some lookalike characters (which have to be updated as more characters are added to Unicode). It's not as clean as I'd like, but it's at least manageable this way.

You might get a kick out of Concise Encoding then (shameless plug). It focuses on security and consistency of behavior.

https://concise-encoding.org/

In particular:

* How to deal with unrepresentable values: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

* Mandatory limits and security considerations: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

* Consistent error classification and processing: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...