Experienced Devs

3981 readers

1 users here now

A community for discussion amongst professional software developers.

Posts should be relevant to those well into their careers.

For those looking to break into the industry, are hustling for their first job, or have just started their career and are looking for advice, check out:

Logo base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

What is the best file format for configuration file? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

40 comments fedilink hide all child comments

.yaml, .toml, etc?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Depends on what you mean exactly with "file format".

If declarative functional programming falls under that, I think something like Nickel, the already mentioned Dhall or Nix. Though Nix more so for packaging and some kind of system management (NixOS?), it's not easily embeddable into a runtime (your app?). Nickel or Dhall is better for that, as they are built from ground up with that in mind, Nickel is maybe the successor of Nix as it is inspired by Dhall and Nix (one goal is to use it Nickel as frontend).

The reason why I recommend a simple declarative language, is that that they are much better composable as it lets the user hide boilerplate via functions. I almost always feel limited by static configuration formats like yaml, json etc..