> There exist various extensions of json that extend it just enough to make it a usable config format without introducing too much complexity. Json with comments is probably the most widespread, as it is used as the config format for Visual Studio Code. The main downside of these is that they haven’t really caught on (yet!), so they aren’t as widely supported as json or yaml.
What blew my mind was learning that the entire JSON grammar is included as a subset in the YAML grammar. So every valid JSON document is automatically a valid YAML document.
But you don't have to stop there. You could also mix and match the JSON grammar elements with the additional "proper YAML" ones - including comments.
So this means any* software that accepts a YAML config would also accept the config as JSON or JSON-with-comments instead. No ecosystem bootstrapping necessary!
(*or almost any, as long as they don't use dicts with non-string keys)
I often make use of that when dealing with unholiness of tempting yaml with jinja in Ansible; instead of faffing around with getting yaml whitespacing juuust right, you can dump whatever python object you have right into json inside your yaml template. Pretty-print the json if you want, or just stick a blob in there.
What blew my mind was learning that the entire JSON grammar is included as a subset in the YAML grammar. So every valid JSON document is automatically a valid YAML document.
But you don't have to stop there. You could also mix and match the JSON grammar elements with the additional "proper YAML" ones - including comments.
So this means any* software that accepts a YAML config would also accept the config as JSON or JSON-with-comments instead. No ecosystem bootstrapping necessary!
(*or almost any, as long as they don't use dicts with non-string keys)