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by jgarzik 784 days ago
Where is the file format specification?

I would prefer to write a parser with zero dependencies.
1 comments
SonOfLilit 784 days ago
They strongly discourage you.

Unified: More than a specification, Nimble is a product. We strongly discourage developers to (re-)implement Nimble’s spec to prevent environmental fragmentation issues observed with similar projects in the past. We encourage developers to leverage the single unified Nimble library, and create high-quality bindings to other languages as needed.

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jgarzik 784 days ago
Sigh. I get more than enough of that in the blockchain world.

Call me a greybeard; I want multiple implementations and a spec.

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SonOfLilit 783 days ago
To be clear, I agree with you (and my beard is kinda graying). Just pointing out that they don't.
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hi-v-rocknroll 784 days ago
A spec. There is no substitute for it. Code isn't a spec. A spec is documentation that describes a format and/or operation. The absence of it is laziness and/or arrogance.
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zzulus 784 days ago
Some dudes worked hard to create this thing and open source it, and here you are calling them lazy and/or arrogant.

On the other hand - it's an open source project, I hope someone can contribute to it and create a PR with the spec.

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hi-v-rocknroll 784 days ago
The outrage! The vague feelings of people I don't know taking things out of context may survive. If not, I'll bring them soup.

There are some unfortunately popular projects like Puppet over the past 20 years who tried to sell the lack of documentation as a positive, or just had incomplete and outdated documentation like Chef. ;] On the flip side, IETF RFCs, Python PEPs, and Rust RFCs are examples where specifications made things clearer and open to everyone. It's not enough to open source a thing without context or comments, the learning curve must be accounted for to make it as self-service and understandable as possible to people who have domain knowledge but have never used this particular thing before. OOTBE UX. Code maybe a communication of intended system behavior, but it is often too low-level and spread around to be relied upon as a singular, compact reference.

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karmakaze 784 days ago
Why not instead make a test suite of inputs and expected pass/fail for validation of implementations.

It's not more than a specification if a single implementation is to be used--then it's a 'spec' defined by the implementation because any idiosyncrasies of that implementation become defacto specification.

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yencabulator 784 days ago
Untrusted file parsing in C++ is not how many people wish to roll in 2024.
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