Comment by onetom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onetom | Hacker News Reader

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I wonder, how rigidly has the JSON format been baked into the protocol.

It feels like a shortsighted choice, just because it's prevalent in recent decades.

It took years to implement performant parsers for it and it has a lot of quirks, missing features and the tons of double quotes and mandatory commas significantly harm its human readability...

Not sure what would I recommend instead, but personally I would prefer using EDN instead, as a Clojure programmer

https://github.com/edn-format/edn

You can write lexicon (the schema) in whatever language you want and then transform them to JSON for sharing.

The record format should be something widely used and implemented for sending over the wire. There are lots of languages and ecosystems participating.

  > The record format should be something widely used and implemented for sending over the wire.

That's just one of the parameters. It should also be something efficient if it's going to be sent over the wire at scale.

We're all sending JSON around all the time, it's not really that big a performance hit, especially in context of the formats transiting networks today (it's the same, lots and lots of JSON)

Note that it's CBOR being sent over WebSockets (afaik).

The firehose is CBOR, jetstream is JSON (which more people use)

I was mainly speaking more generally than atproto. Most APIs talk JSON these days

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