[esprehn]

Not supporting comments will be a mistake that haunts this API. They give an example of replacing properties files but those do have standardized comments! The proposed pre-processing step means all the comments are lost during round tripping, and the single line comments they suggest are not enough to even match JSONC. By the time those issues have userland workarounds you might as well use another library instead of the built-in one.

This seems to repeat the same mistakes of Go's built in JSON library where the ecosystem is full of workarounds and other libraries that are faster or have better features.

[zbentley]

Eh, I think it's a good tradeoff. If it losslessly supported deserializing comments/JSONC, or trailing commas, or JSON-lines, or whatever, the serialization APIs would get more complicated. Every time you serialize you'd have to decide which of several formats you were producing. Automatic round-trippability would still be impossible in that world, since e.g. "deserialize JSON-ish, set one key=value, reserialize" would then risk producing a not-strictly-JSON object that broke whatever it was sent to, so then you'd need a whole bunch of different serialization configs/settings, which would confuse newbies (either they produce something that's subtly different from what they need, or they accidentally strip out information).

As similar as all the almost-JSON formats are, I still think it's best to keep APIs single-purpose: one for JSON, one for JSON-lines, one for JSONC, and so on. It's a larger code surface, but a less potentially surprising one.