Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by shaftway | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

shaftway

Personally I use textprotos for configuration whenever I can.

- Syntax for the configuration is straightforward.

- Syntax for the definition is straightforward.

- It supports comments (end of line and full line).

- It's not NP complete and there is no weird parser meta-language or includes.

- There are parsers for any major language I've used in the last decade.

- It gives me a strongly typed definition so I don't have to infer or parse values.

- It's easy to verify the validity during lint tests by using protoc to encode to a binary proto.

It'd be nice if it supported unicode a bit better, but it's configuration, so that's not a common concern.

View on HN

Textproto version of the TOML homepage example that kstrauser's called out:

    servers {
      alpha {
        ip: "10.0.0.1"
        role: "frontend"
      }
      beta {
        ip: "10.0.0.2"
        role: "backend"
      }
    }

Ooh, shiny! I like that. It looks a lot like HCL, but with the lessons learned from making protobufs.

looks like json without commas. i like that. but i don't like that the outer keywords don't have a colon while the inner ones do. it feels inconsistent.

Sadly, list of elements in textproto, being repeated items, appear repeated, which isn’t great.

Can you expand on that a little, what do you mean exactly?

Like this

  grocery_list {
        fruits: "apple"
        fruits: "banana"
        fruits: "pear"
  }

Repeated fields can use the list syntax:

  grocery_list {
        fruits: [ "apple", "banana", "pear" ]
  }

I've been playing with a lispy thing that might be:

    (grocery_list
      (fruit "apple")
      (fruit "banana")
      (fruit "pear"))

That's pretty much exactly XML. Alternatively:

    (grocery_list
      (fruits "apple" "banana" "pear"))

but the semantics are different.

My motivation is expressing docker-compose.yaml in the "best" way I can imagine, as a design exercise. In that case, I'd rather have a bunch of (service ...) forms, instead of a "services" object. Not sure why. Maybe it's a pun on interpreter-driven formats like that used by [guix][1].

[1]: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Shepherd-Services.h...

> That's pretty much exactly XML

Haha, what?

Thank you! Didn’t know that!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com