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Comment by imiric | Hacker News Reader

That's neat, but I'm much more intrigued by your Concise Encoding project[1]. I see that it only has a single Go reference implementation that hasn't been updated in 3 years. Is the project still relevant?

Thanks for sharing your work!

[1]: https://concise-encoding.org/

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Thanks!

I'm actually having second thoughts with Concise Encoding. It's gotten very big with all the features it has, which makes it less likely to be adopted (people don't like new things).

I've been toying around with a less ambitious format called ORB: https://github.com/kstenerud/orb

It's essentially an extension of BONJSON (so it can read BONJSON documents natively) that adds extra types and features.

I'm still trying to decide what types will actually be of use in the real world... CE's graph type is cool, but if nobody uses it...

I use ASN.1X, so I use some types that those other formats do not have. Some of the types of ASN.1 are: unordered set, ISO 2022 string, object identifier, bit string. I added some additional types into ASN.1X, such as: TRON string, rational numbers, key/value list (with any types for keys and for values (and the types of keys do not necessarily have to match); for one thing, keys do not have to be Unicode), and reference to other nodes. However, ASN.1 (and ASN.1X) does not distinguish between qNaN and sNaN. I had also made up TER, which is a text format that can be converted to DER (like how ORT can be converted to ORB, although its working is differently, and is not compatible with JSON (TER somewhat resembles PostScript)).

Your extensions of JSON with comments, hexadecimal notation, optional commas, etc is useful though (my own program to convert JSON to DER does treat commas as spaces, although that is an implementation detail).

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