std.data.json formal review

[Sebastiaan Koppe via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 6 October 2015 at 10:05:46 UTC, Alex wrote:
> I wonder if it would be better to write a more abstract 
> serialisation/persistance module that could use either 
> json,xml,some binary format and future formats.

I think there are too many particulars making an abstract 
(de)serialization module unworkable.

If that wasn't the case it would be easy to transform any format 
into another, by simply deserializing from format A and 
serializing to format B. But a little experiment will show you 
that it requires a lot of complexity for the non-trivial case. 
And the format's particulars will still show up in your code.

At which point it begs the question, why not just write simple 
primitive (de)serialization modules that only do one format? 
Probably easier to build, maintain and debug.

I am reminded of a binary file format I once wrote which 
supported referenced objects and had enough meta-data to allow 
garbage collection. It was a big ugly c++ template monster. Any 
abstract deserializer is going to stay away from that.