On Tuesday, 28 February 2023 at 14:29:28 UTC, Mathias LANG wrote:
>JSON was there from the beginning, I assume due to Dub's npm inspiration.
Composer uses it, too.
(It’s not like NPM and DUB were the only ones to use it for package recipes.)
It’s a simple and commonly understood format, widely used (mostly for other use cases, of course) and feels similar to program code.
I assume most users are probably already familiar with it. Chances that someone has to “get into” this format just to use DUB are pretty low.
What do other languages use for their “package” descriptions:
- Windows: Chocolatey: XML (+ JSON)
- Go.mod: custom(?)
- Java: Maven: XML
- JavaScript: Bower: JSON
- JavaScript: NPM: JSON
- .NET: NuGet: XML
- Nim: nimble: custom(?)
- PHP: Composer: JSON
- Rust: crates: TOML
- Zig: zigmod: YAML