Toml: Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language

Post by mojombo » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 9:27 PM UTC

gregn610 wrote: post #92

mojombo wrote: post #10

Hey, Tom here (creator of TOML). Fun to see TOML on HN again! Since I first wrote a (mostly) joke proposal for TOML 5 years ago, TOML has been adopted by a number of prominent projects such as Cargo, Hugo, Pipenv, and others. TOML is especially well suited for projects that need a simple configuration file that maps unambiguously to a hash table. There are still some weaknesses in TOML that make it non-optimal for la…

A killer feature of TOML compared to JSON is that it allows comments. A config file without comments and examples ain't great. I found the double square bracket syntax useful and understandable. Agreed it's not obviously .INI or perfectly elegant but it certainly works and has its use-cases. Anyways, thank you @mojombo!

Post by mojombo » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 9:30 PM UTC

liquidgecka wrote: post #98

mojombo wrote: post #10

Hey, Tom here (creator of TOML). Fun to see TOML on HN again! Since I first wrote a (mostly) joke proposal for TOML 5 years ago, TOML has been adopted by a number of prominent projects such as Cargo, Hugo, Pipenv, and others. TOML is especially well suited for projects that need a simple configuration file that maps unambiguously to a hash table. There are still some weaknesses in TOML that make it non-optimal for la…

damn it.. of course you would update the spec right before I release my config parser. =) I have been working on a TOML reader/writer for golang that supports read/change/write and format (like go fmt) that sometime I will get enough time to actually finish and release. =)

Post by yuchi » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 9:33 PM UTC

mojombo wrote: post #52

echohack5 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Tom, I just wanted to say thank you real quick. We use TOML in [Habitat]( https://github.com/habitat-sh/habitat ) to define default and overridable configuration. It's super easy and expressive. The [Habitat Core Plans]( https://github.com/habitat-sh/core-plans ) have quite a few examples about how it gets used in the project. If you are looking for examples of larger configuration files with .toml, then that mig…

Amazing, thanks for the heads up! I'll add it to the list of projects using TOML [1] and take a look at your example configs to get some more real-world uses cases to look at when evaluating future changes to the spec. [1] https://github.com/toml-lang/toml/wiki

Post by exabrial » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 9:37 PM UTC

Post by mojombo » Fri, Jul 13, 2018, 9:41 PM UTC

ben509 wrote: post #76

mojombo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's not my favorite part either. We've made them mostly unnecessary by adding inline tables, but for heavy nesting of arrays of tables, you still need to use them, which is why I mentioned that there are still some weaknesses for large, complex config files. Hoping to make this better in 2.0.

In defense of double brackets, I first encountered TOML in pipenv[1], and just by experimenting found I could add another source. So they're reasonably obvious if you see them in an existing file. [1]: https://github.com/pypa/pipfile#pipfile