subunit-dev team mailing list archive

[Robert Collins <robertc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I love our little text format.

However, it requires a customer parser, not just tree processor, in
every language.

http://www.json.org/ has a silly number of implementations of json
parsers in most every language.

I'm seeking thoughts on a protocol bump to start using json.

We only have a couple of parsers implemented today; as long as they
dynamically switch it seems like it wouldn't be very traumatic.

I don't think it will make larger questions like 'how to structure X'
easier. It might have terrible consequences for streaming and
passthrough. Specifically, it might not be possible, and we'd end up
writing a custom 'its not quite json' anyway, which would suck.

Perhaps though we could write a layer that splits out passthrough, all
it would need is to know whether the json parser is inside a json
structure or at the top level.

Also json only does unicode, this would naturally make doing binary
hard, and while it sucks people may do that. So we'd have to define
encoding of binary too. (e.g. 'uuencode that, then put it in the
stream').

-Rob

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