[HideousKojima]

What if I hate both formats? XML is overly verbose, while JSON isn't specific enough or precise enough for a lot of my needs.

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[filoeleven]

I just checked out the spec, and it gets pretty ugly in the Table section. A lot of the json examples are both shorter and IMO more precise. Stuff that’s not allowed with [table] is allowed with [[table]], and it’s confusing to understand what level of depth I’m at.

I’ll take edn over any of “em. https://github.com/edn-format/edn

Comments and time stamps allowed, arbitrary nesting of data structures, make your own tagged literals if you need them. And commas are whitespace, mostly unnecessary.

[62951413]

I've got yet another markup language for your hate group's target list :)

Come join the dark side where we enjoy the wonders of binary formats such as avro and protobuf.

[HideousKojima]

I actually love binary formats, especially for network communication. We probably waste tons of processing power and network bandwidth needlessly sending JSON back and forth everywhere and re-deserializing it. I'm personally a fan of MessagePack.

Though for something where you want human readability it's hard to beat TOML in my opinion.

[dralley]

https://github.com/ron-rs/ron

[rewgs]

Absolutely agree. TOML is far and away the best for config files.

[mdaniel]

You can't be serious; I can't stand having to guess what kind of crazy markup is required to express things in toml. As a concrete example I converted my local kubeconfig (which is yaml) and here are the completely random characters indicating some kind of hierarchy

    apiVersion = "v1"
    current-context = ""
    kind = "Config"

    [[clusters]]
    name = "my-cluster"

    [clusters.cluster]
    certificate-authority-data = "LS0tL..."
    server = "https://example.com"

    [[contexts]]
    name = "context0"

    [contexts.context]
    cluster = "my-cluster"
    user = "my-user"

    [[contexts]]
    name = "context1"

    [contexts.context]
    cluster = "my-cluster"
    user = "my-user"

    [[users]]
    name = "my-user"

    [users.user]
    [users.user.exec]
    apiVersion = "client.authentication.k8s.io/v1beta1"
    args = ["eks", "get-token"]
    command = "aws"

[rewgs]

As the other person who replied to you noted, a converted-from-yaml file wherein the service is designed to use yaml, not toml, it hardly a good example of toml. Of course your example is bad.

At least use a native toml file as an example.

[jsmith45]

It is really just arrays of objects/dicts that get complicated with TOML. For dictionary properties not inside an array, you can either fully specify the path `foor.bar.baz = 7`, or use a header like `[foo.bar]` and specify `baz=7`.

Also if I was handwriting that I would probably make more use of doted property names implying dictionaries like so, which though it has a little bit more repetition in property names, seems easier to read:

    apiVersion = "v1"
    current-context = ""
    kind = "Config"

    [[clusters]]
    name = "my-cluster"
    cluster.certificate-authority-data = "LS0tL..."
    cluster.server = "https://example.com"

    [[contexts]]
    name = "context0"
    context.cluster = "my-cluster"
    context.user = "my-user"

    [[contexts]]
    name = "context1"
    context.cluster = "my-cluster"
    context.user = "my-user"

    [[users]]
    name = "my-user"
    user.exec.apiVersion = "client.authentication.k8s.io/v1beta1"
    user.exec.args = ["eks", "get-token"]
    user.exec.command = "aws"

If k8s was designed with TOML in mind, it probably have been structured differently, such that "Contexts" for example might be just a dictionary mapping names to an object that has the values from the "context" property (The existing pattern of an array of objects where each object has a name, but store most of their properties in a property whose name matches the object's type is already weird, but doesn't look terrible in yaml.)

Such a redesigned to be a more TOML friendly schema would then look like this:

    apiVersion = "v1"
    current-context = ""
    kind = "Config"

    [clusters.my-cluster]
    certificate-authority-data = "LS0tL..."
    server = "https://example.com"

    [contexts.context0]
    cluster = "my-cluster"
    user = "my-user"

    [contexts.context1]
    cluster = "my-cluster"
    user = "my-user"

    [users.my-user.exec]
    apiVersion = "client.authentication.k8s.io/v1beta1"
    args = ["eks", "get-token"]
    command = "aws"