The funny thing about this is that JavaScript the language has had support for BigIntegers for many years at this point. You can just write 123n for a bigint of 123.

JSON could easily be extended to support them - but there’s no standards body with the authority to make a change like that. So we’re probably stuck with json as-is forever. I really hope something better comes along that we can all agree on before I die of old age.

While we’re at it, I’d also love a way to embed binary data in json. And a canonical way to represent dates. And comments. And I’d like a sane, consistent way to express sum types. And sets and maps (with non string keys) - which JavaScript also natively supports. Sigh.

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aapoalas a day ago | parent | next [-]

It's more a problem of support and backwards compatibility. JSON and parsers for it are so ubiquitous, and the spec completely lacks any versioning support, that adding a feature would be a breaking change of horrible magnitude, on nearly all levels of the modern software infrastructure stack. I wouldn't be surprised if some CPUs might break from that :D

JSON is a victim of its success: it has become too big to fail, and too big to improve.

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Sammi a day ago | parent | prev [-]

There are easy workarounds to getting bigints in JSON: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/jsbi/issues/30#issuecomm...

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josephg 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure; and I can encode maps and sets as entry lists. Binary data as strings and so on. But I don’t want to. I shouldn’t have to.

The fact remains that json doesn’t have native support for any of this stuff. I want something json-like which supports all this stuff natively. I don’t want to have to figure out if some binary data is base64 encoded or hex encoded or whatever, and hack around jackson or serde or javascript to encode and decode my objects properly. Features like this should be built in.

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Sammi 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Agree. JSON definitely needs an update so we can get better ergonomics built in.

In code you control you can choose to use JSON5: https://json5.org/

	▲	josephg 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Cool. Pity it still doesn’t support bigint, binary data, maps, sets, non-string keys or dates though.