On: Show HN: Bake – A modular build system and package manager for C/C++

[richardwhiuk]

Toml would be the best choice IMO

[crdoconnor → richardwhiuk]

TOML is syntactically noisy and about 50% more verbose.

[cyphar → crdoconnor]

I'm not sure how

    [general]
    foo = bar

is 50% more verbose than

    { "general": { "foo": "bar" } }

But also it's significantly more human-readable (and critically, it's much more human-writable).

[crdoconnor → cyphar]

It starts to get more verbose when you have more keys and deeper indentation since the whole hierarchy is repeated for each key e.g. [general.foo.bar.bar].

JSON wasn't intended for maximal human readability/writability like CSON/YAML were. It was intended first and foremost as a simple data transmission format.

[richardwhiuk → crdoconnor]

Large hierarchies are always difficult in plain text formats. I'd argue if you need the user programming the config to understand a large hierarchy then you've already got a problem.

[crdoconnor → richardwhiuk]

By large I mean two/three levels and above. Nothing's perfect but YAML does that fairly well (e.g. ansible playbooks)

TOML handles anything three levels or above in a less readable way than indented JSON (which doesn't even prioritize readability).

It looks find provided you're only dealing with tiny ultra simple config files.

[richardwhiuk → crdoconnor]

   [foo.blah.bee]
   hi = 4

seems readable enough.

[thechao → richardwhiuk]

GRON and KVIN are better because: (1) I wrote KVIN as a long term joke to give my boss a stroke; and, (2) I like GRON’s author’s style.

KVIN: https://github.com/jaroslov/kvin

GRON: I can’t find the spec; sorry.