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by dpeckett 554 days ago
I'd say the success of REST kind of proves that's something that for the most part can be worked around. Often comes down to the JSON codec itself, many codecs will allow unmarshalling/marshalling fields straight into long int types.

Also JS now has BigInt types and the JSON decoder can be told to use them. So I'd argue it's kind of a moot point at this stage.
5 comments
tikhonj 554 days ago
Sure, but you can work around gRPC's issues too—"workable" might be the only bar that matters in practice, but it's a remarkably low bar.

The risk with JSON is that too many systems understand it, and intermediate steps can mess up things like numeric precision as well as being inconsistent about handling things out of spec (field order, duplicate fields... etc). This definitely bites people in practice—I saw an experience report on that recently, but can't find the link just now :/

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dagss 554 days ago
JS having BigInt type has nothing to do with JSON. Backend languages have had BigInt types forever. It isn't relevant to JSON as a format.

Just one example: Azure Cosmos DB stores JSON documents. If you try to store integers larger than 53 bits there those integers will be silently rounded to 53 bits. I know someone who got burned by this very badly loosing their data; I was able to explain them exactly why...

JSON basically does not define what a number is; and that is a disaster for it as an API format.

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malkia 554 days ago
It's not, because some middleman (library, framework, etc.) would assume that JSON is really about sending integers as doubles, hence you are getting only 53 or was it 54 bits precision, and then you end up sending an integer as "string" - but then what is this really?

I get it, it's probably not a concern for a lot of applications, but when comes to science, games, data it's of big concern... and this excluding the fact that you have to convert back and forth that number a... number of times, and send it on the wire inefficiently - and also miss a way to send it more efficiently using gorilla encoding or something else like that.

JSON is great for a lot of things, but not for high throughput RPC.

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eadmund 554 days ago
> I'd say the success of REST

I think that you mean the success of JSON APIs. REST is orthogonal to JSON/Protobuf/HTML/XML/S-expressions/whatever.

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paulddraper 554 days ago
> Also JS now has BigInt types and the JSON decoder can be told to use them.

The parser needs to know when to parse as BigInt vs String.

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