The news here is (presumably) the announcement of version 0.5.0 a few days prior [1], which includes several clarifications, rollup changes, and enhancements that accumulated over the last 3 years.
In my opinion, one of the more useful features was the addition of Joda-style datetimes [2][3][4][5], which disambiguates between various kinds of datetime constructs aren't interchangeable yet commonly conflated. It's fair criticism that the addition of rich datetime types exceeds the language's original 'minimal' goal, but too many other languages and formats these days just punt to RFC3339 and leave no guidance or tooling on how to represent dateless times or timeless dates without introducing a ton of side-effects. This is a place where language standard libs, with few exceptions, have repeatedly dropped the ball, and similarly, language or library-agnostic, generic guidance is nowhere to be found.
TOML raises the bar here, by providing a concept and notation to specify these values at rest, and gives parser writers, as opposed to the users, the task of finding a way to represent these values in whatever way is idiomatic for the given language.
Glad you like them, we spent quite a bit of time getting them right! Datetimes are a horrible mess of complexity, but hopefully over time languages and tools around them can standardize on a set of common primitives to make all our lives a bit less horribly messy. =)
In my opinion, one of the more useful features was the addition of Joda-style datetimes [2][3][4][5], which disambiguates between various kinds of datetime constructs aren't interchangeable yet commonly conflated. It's fair criticism that the addition of rich datetime types exceeds the language's original 'minimal' goal, but too many other languages and formats these days just punt to RFC3339 and leave no guidance or tooling on how to represent dateless times or timeless dates without introducing a ton of side-effects. This is a place where language standard libs, with few exceptions, have repeatedly dropped the ball, and similarly, language or library-agnostic, generic guidance is nowhere to be found.
TOML raises the bar here, by providing a concept and notation to specify these values at rest, and gives parser writers, as opposed to the users, the task of finding a way to represent these values in whatever way is idiomatic for the given language.
[1] https://github.com/toml-lang/toml/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md [2] https://github.com/toml-lang/toml/pull/414 [3] https://github.com/toml-lang/toml/pull/362 [4] https://github.com/toml-lang/toml/issues/412 [5] https://github.com/toml-lang/toml/issues/263