dub: JSON, SDL, YAML, TOML, what color should we paint it ?

[Mathias LANG]

On Tuesday, 28 February 2023 at 16:04:42 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 28, 2023 at 03:15:33PM +0000, Adam D Ruppe via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 28 February 2023 at 14:29:28 UTC, Mathias LANG 
>> wrote:
>> > Obviously such a change would not happen overnight, and 
>> > would need broad support from the community. Opinions ?
>> 
>> Here's a wild idea: use the D language. Most the things 
>> dub.json defines are already available in D anyway.
>
> Yes!!  This is the way to go.
>
> At least, use a reasonable subset of D if being Turing-complete 
> is not necessarily a good thing. :-P  Why make the user learn a 
> different syntax?  We're already writing D.  Just reuse D 
> syntax.
>
>
> T

There's a whole world between "imperative" recipes (à la 
Makefile) and declarative ones. I didn't come up with the 
declarative decision for dub, but I don't think it makes sense to 
pivot at this point. And such a pivot would be a much more 
complex discussion than just the format.

Unless you decide to go with D-style, declarative only DSL, but 
is there really a point to that ? Also it means writting yet 
another custom parser, and building something that is inherently 
not easy to interface with. We want more tooling, not less!