ron VS strictyaml

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”.

NestedText already is the way I use YAML; everything is intepreted as a string. I have some trust in my YAML parser to not mangle most strings. I could use NestedText, but users would be unfamiliar with it, and IIRC the only parsers are in Python. But then I could use StrictYaml too https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml

you can stick to a subset of YAML syntax (e.g. strictYAML)

YAML stands for "YAML Ain’t Markup Language" - this is known as a recursive acronym. YAML is often used for writing configuration files. It’s human readable, easy to understand and can be used with other programming languages. Although YAML is commonly used in many disciplines, it has received criticism on the amoutn of whitespace .yml files have, difficulty in editing, and complexity of the standard. Despite the criticism, properly using YAML ensures that you can reproduce the results of a project and makes sure that the virtual environment packages play nicely with system packages. (If you're looking for another way to share environments there are other alternatives to YAML which include StrictYAML (a type-safe YAML parser) and NestedText)

The example you linked provides this as an example of a YAML document that he wants his format to support.

That safe subset exists and is implemented in a number of languages. It is called strict-yaml: https://hitchdev.com/strictyaml/

StrictYAML\ (33 comments)

To me those are in the category of "nice to have", and the problem is that every developer has different preferences for these [1] [2]. But the main features of StrictYaml, like supporting comments and less syntactic noise, I think are pretty uncontroversial, and perhaps it's worth it to get people to switch over for those alone. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be a significant enough improvement over JSON, and I'd say those two features are more than enough

[1]: https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml/issues/37

[2]: https://github.com/crdoconnor/strictyaml/issues/38