[erlang-questions] JSON for STDLIB

[Bob Ippolito]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 2:42 AM, Jesper Louis Andersen <
jesper.louis.andersen@REDACTED> wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 7, 2015 at 3:34 AM, Theepan <vasdeveloper@REDACTED> wrote:
>
>> Since Erlang is now widely used in internet domain, I believe that
>> inclusion of JSON library under STDLIB is essential. There are many open
>> source variants, but I like Jiffy and Jsx. They support MAPS too.
>>
>
> Roughly, two variants of programming language standard libraries exist,
> where most languages sit somewhere on the continuum of these extreme points:
>
> 1. Put as little as possible in the standard library. Usually only put the
> things necessary to write the compiler itself, and the libraries which are
> impossible to write without close support from the compiler/runtime.
>
> 2. Use the Stdlib to "bless" certain implementations of commonly used
> libraries as the default. The Stdlib is considerably larger, but is
> guaranteed to have seen lots of testing.
>
> It is not a priori clear one solution beats the other. There are
> advantages and disadvantages to both models. Personally I lean toward
> option 1, because I "come from" languages which used this model: Standard
> ML and OCaml. The danger of such a model however is that you end up with
> many stdlib implementations, and in statically typed languages you often
> end up in situations where packages built for one stdlib are not compatible
> with the other stdlib.
>
> This makes people yearn for option 2. But it is not without its
> consequences either. Work on the stdlib is now centered around a few
> people, so it will invariably move slower. The other problem is that
> updates to the stdlib is now locked to the update rate of the compiler.
> This is rarely desirable. And when new releases come out, everyone has to
> scramble in order to upgrade everything in the stdlib they rely on. In a
> more compartamentalized world, you can go update packages separately.
>
> JSON is particularly nasty because different characteristics are mandated
> by different users. Some want fast JSON parsing. Some want correct JSON
> parsing. Some want mapping rules into their Erlang world. For this reason,
> there are always many disparate JSON libraries in any language (C has at
> least 10, Java has at least 20). You *can* pick one and put into the
> stdlib, but people still have to build their own to their wants.
>
> In my opinion, there are far too many libraries in the standard Erlang/OTP
> distribution. This means more work on the Ericsson Erlang/OTP team and we
> can't mint a new fix package for a separate area without rolling a new
> point release for Erlang/OTP. Moving some things into separate repositories
> would help a lot. But it also requires some work on package management so
> the transition is as seamless as possible.
>

Yeah, what's really needed here is a working dependency management solution
that the community standardizes on. Some brave person can build the
high-performance library that does the low-level JSON stream parsing and
nasty string/float encoding bits, and then a mountain of higher-level
libraries can use that as a common dependency.

-bob
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