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Amazon invented Ion because yaml, Avro, etc. didn't exist at the time. Ion is actually pretty old.

The timing of open-sourcing it mystifies me a bit. Maybe Amazon is trying to become more open-source friendly, like Microsoft did?

Perhaps more likely: they're planning on making some internal APIs that use ION heavily public?

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Are we talking about a different YAML, or has Ion existed for ~15 years?

Woah, you're right. I thought YAML was much younger. I stand corrected.

Ion is definitely from last decade, at least. So most of the speculation in my post stands.

The JSON RFC was published right around the time Ion was being created making Ion about 10 years old this year. It was not clear at the time that JSON would become so popular ;-) and at the same time Ion fixed a lot of its weak areas (numeric types, dates, struct/object syntax, etc.)

That's not true. Avro at least existed at the time. However they wanted something self-describing to replace JSON/XML usage. Avro is better suited as a data storage format rather than a transit oriented format. Of course, both Ion and Avro can be used for either, but Avro will give you better compression on disk, but Ion is less cumbersome since it doesn't require a schema

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