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Comment by purplesyringa | Hacker News Reader

> Rust should have Jason built in.

I don't think this is a reasonable approach. That's just a way to introduce bloat. Importantly, std does not differ from other crates, except for stability guarantees, so there would be no positive here. All it does is link the library's release cycle to the compiler's. (In fact, rustc-serialize used to be built-in, so Rust tried to go that way.)

But also, serde_json isn't large by default. I'm not sure where you are getting those numbers from. serde_json isn't large, serde isn't large. They both have very low MSRVs few other crates support, so in all truth they can't even have many dependencies.

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> That's just a way to introduce bloat.

I don't think "bloat" is the issue; as I'm sure you know, Rust programs only contain code for the features of the stdlib they use; if it had JSON support and it wasn't used, the linker would omit that code from the final binary. (Granted, that would make the linker work a little harder.)

More at issue is maintenance burden. Data formats come and go over time. In 10 or 20 years when JSON has faded to XML's level of relevance, the Rust stdlib team shouldn't have to continue maintaining a JSON parser.

Std definitely differs from other crates:

1. There's only one version so you can't end up with multiple copies of the crate.

2. It is precompiled, so it doesn't bloat your target directory or compile time.

3. It is able to use unstable features without using the nightly compiler.

It's a totally reasonable approach. Many other languages have JSON support in their standard libraries and it works fine. I'm not sure I'd want it, but I wouldn't say it's an obviously bad idea.

> Many other languages have JSON support in their standard libraries and it works fine. I'm not sure I'd want it, but I wouldn't say it's an obviously bad idea.

I would say it's a bad idea. JSON is, for lack of a better (less derogatory) term, a data-format fad. If Rust had been designed back in 2000 we'd be having this discussion about XML. Hell, consider Javascript (where JSON comes from), with XHR: remember that stands for "XMLHttpRequest"! Of course it can be used with data payloads other than XML; fortunately the people who added it weren't that short-sighted, but the naming is an interesting historical artifact that shows what was only fleetingly dominant at the time as an API data format.

In another 20 years, when Rust is hopefully still a relevant, widely-used language, we may not be using JSON much at all (and oof, I really hope we aren't), and yet the Rust team would still have to maintain that code were it in the stdlib.

Consider also that Rust's stdlib doesn't even have a TOML parser, even though that seems to be Rust's configuration format of choice.

Ha I really hope you're right about JSON being a fad, and something better will come along.

I would bet against it though. JSON's flaws (ambiguous spec re numbers & duplicate keys etc; no comments, strings aren't zero copy...) are pretty minor compared to XML's (completely wrong data model, insanely verbose, not even basic data types).

There was much more motivation to replace XML than JSON.

Also even though XML has been broadly replaced, it's still widespread and I don't think it would be out of place to have it in a standard library. Go has, and Go's standard library is one of its highlights.

> I don't think this is a reasonable approach. That's just a way to introduce bloat.

Can this meme die already? The fact that out of the box install of Rust can’t parse JSON is a joke, and you know it.

Rust has a great package manager, so moving libs into std doesn’t bring much benefit.

On the other hand a change like this perf improvement can be released without tying it to a language version, that’s good too.

> On the other hand a change like this perf improvement can be released without tying it to a language version, that’s good too.

And you pay for that by having literally no way to parse something ubiquitous like json out of the box on install, relying to either installing third party lib (which is yet another security attack vector, requires yet another approval for upgrade, API can change on a whim by maintainer and other can of worms) or by using other language.

I think you can consider a few extremely common crates (serde, tokio, etc.) to basically not be "third-party". The risk that dtolnay will randomly break serde_json is not meaningfully different from the risk that the rust core team will randomly break the standard library.

> requires yet another approval for upgrade

Approval from whom?

Out-of-the-box you can add serde_json to your Cargo.toml file in a single line and have JSON parsing.

    serde_json = "*"

I'm not sure I see the problem.

If you have a vaguely modern Rust, you can just "cargo add serde_json" and Cargo will make the change for you.

Repeating the same claim more incredulously isn’t really a good debating tactic.

I don’t want to wait on language releases to get updates to json, regex, etc. Nor do I want a crappy stdlib impl of something to become widespread just because it comes out of the box like Go’s worst of breed html templating and http “routing”.

Somehow Python and JS can get away with json in std lib, but thing that builds binaries can’t?

How often does it even need to be updated to parse freaking json?

Python's json is an often-quoted example of why not to have it in the standard lib. There are some bad defaults that no one can fix for stability reasons. Though I admit it does come in handy sometimes.

In production, I've lately seen serde_json backed python implementations, this makes sense for performance and memory safety.

If Rust were a "web language", sure, I'd think it would have to have JSON support built in.

Rust is a systems programming language. If Rust had JSON support built in, I'd take it much less seriously. JSON is a fad, just like XML was 20 years ago. In 20 years, when JSON goes the way of XML, the Rust stdlib team should not have to continue maintaining a JSON parser.

An out of the box install of C can't parse JSON either. Do you think C is a joke? C++? Java?

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