Too late!
> But you can always put JSON through a pretty-printer which puts values into canonical form before diffing.
Son is a starting point for building such a pretty printer. It takes care of messy details like eliminating the redundancies in string and number encoding, so all you have to do to specify the pretty-printer format is say where you want your newlines and how much to indent by.
I don't understand: such pretty printers already exist (e.g. jq, which does a whole lot more [0]). If you're transmitting JSON and want to diff two documents, just pipe them into jq or another pretty-printer with key ordering, then use one of many existing line-by-line diff tools.
[0]: github.com/stedolan/jq
Unfortunately, jq doesn't provide flags to control scientific/non-scientific notation or which characters are escaped, meaning if you want very tight control over the JSON generated it's not a full option.
(Consider that the motivating example in the Son README isn't all you might want to use Son for. For instance some people need consistent hashing of serialized JSON documents).
Side note: I respect your positivity and steadfastness in the face of a skeptical HN response.
$ echo "1." | jq .
1
It might be simpler to change jq and/or other pretty printers (though might be implementation or design reasons not to).
But the other advantage of a new project like SON is positioning not engineering, in our heads, not in the code: tool for the job. If so, the page should spend more time on what that job is (for when people search for that job).
And, as the jq example shows, tools not designed for this job mightn't do it exactly right.
EDIT I was reading offline, so didn't see the sibling reply.