JSON in OTP

[Viktor Söderqvist]

12 years have passed since EEP 18. [1] Since then, maps have been added
to Erlang and the string module has been made accept binaries. This
makes up a more obvious representation of JSON than in 2005 [2].

If anyone was arguing that OTP is made for telecom and not web
development, this argument doesn't hold anymore, now that the telecom
standards are replacing GTP and Diameter with HTTP and JSON.

The 5G mobile network specifications are full of JSON, REST and HTTP/2
(e.g. 3GPP TS 29.500 [3]) and in 3GPP TS 29.501 [4] things like
HATEOAS, OpenAPI specifications using JSON Schema and YAML files and
how JSON documents should be patched using HTTP PATCH requests are
covered. (Other interesting 5G specs are 23.501 [5] and 23.502 [6].)

JSON has also been standardized as ECMA-404 [7] in 2017.

Is it time to re-evaluate adding json:{encode,decode}/1 in OTP? Or are
the arguments against it still valid?

Regards,
Viktor

[1]: http://erlang.org/eeps/eep-0018.html
[2]: 
http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2005-November/017805.html
[3]: https://www.3gpp.org/DynaReport/29500.htm (Click the Versions tab,
then click a linked version number to download a zip file which
contains a Word document, which can be converted to a readable
format...)
[4]: https://www.3gpp.org/DynaReport/29501.htm
[5]: https://www.3gpp.org/DynaReport/23501.htm
[6]: https://www.3gpp.org/DynaReport/23502.htm
[7]: 
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/ECMA-404.pdf