2023 May Be A Year Of TOML

Aside of JSON and XML there is a config format with increasing adoption. TOML may be something you’ll like.

XML

Like every .NET developer for years I’ve worked with XML files for config and serializing data.

I like XML because it’s very verbose and it’s hard to break it. To a point it’s also diffucult to edit it. As a transfer format it’s nice and gives the assurance the receiving end will either fail than read it bad.

But it comes also with some downsides. For example it’s extremely heavy, a disadventage thst makes you question of 100MB of raw data should end up as 1GB on a storage unit, accounting also to a heavy memory usage during parsing. Something new parsers are deal with quite good.

JSON

On the other side of the spectrum is JSON, a format implicite of frontend, and especially web development.

JSON is light, it’s easy to stringify data, and parse them with JavaScript. But when you start to work with JSON config files you immediately notice that editing a JSON is somehow troublesome.