Recent searches
Search options
A lot of senior engineers loathe YAML. This piece describes a few pain points. (But skips the document-delimiter problem.)
https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell
@timbray oh man yaml is so fucked!!! Very insightful BTW!
@timbray Tell me about it!
Simple things should be simple.
@timbray this is a great article full of good points but still I can't help but like YAML as an easy-to-read and *usually*-easy-to-write file format where most of the time if it doesn't behave as you expect you just need to quote your value. It's entirely true that YAML tries to be too many things for too many people and in doing so sets users up for some very weird behavior but the core of it doesn't really *need* most or any of those footguns and IMO they're pretty easy to avoid.
@timbray I know that "it's pretty easy to avoid all the footguns" isn't a glowing endorsement of any product but all I'm saying is that I get why people don't like it, but most of the stuff they don't like isn't really central to the basic format (base 60? "Yes" and "No"?) and so I personally don't dislike it
@timbray I can't count the number of times I've seen data/config failures because of an indirect indention.
@timbray Another accidental number problem: unquoted version number 1.10 parses to 1.1.
"... loading an untrusted yaml document is generally unsafe, as it may lead to arbitrary code execution."
Just... wow.
@timbray What’s the document delimiter pr
@carlmjohnson @timbray when parsing a format like YAML (TOML has the same problem) you can't reliably determine where the content starts, or where it definitely ends.
Unlike, say, JSON (which has its own problems). If you reach the end of a JSON file and don't see the final closing "}" you know the content was accidentally truncated.
@nikclayton @carlmjohnson Um Nik, Carl was illustrating the problem. 
@nikclayton @timbray @carlmjohnson But thanks for explaining it! I was wondering what the doc delim problem was. Then I went back and got the joke. 
Related to the YAML post, I've obviously caught a lot of flak for using XML for the Syncthing config format. Nobody loves XML! But I still haven't seen an alternative that nails it. Cue looks promising should we want to move there, maybe integrating with our existing protobuf stuff as well.
@timbray Absolutely, I have written a small parser of the safe subset of #YAML on the top of PyYAML (https://pypi.org/project/yamlish/) and God it was the most awful experience! It is absolutely powerful (comparing to JSON is ludicrous), but the result is so complicated that it is almost unuseable.
@timbray does yaml not have a grammar?
