[PATCH] D93528: [clang-format] Add basic support for formatting JSON

[Sam McCall via Phabricator via cfe-commits]

sammccall added a comment.

In theory, this version doesn't seem so useful - a simple JSON pretty-printer that ignores column widths etc is easy to write, doesn't need any of clang-format's infrastructure, and this isn't a particularly great one.

In practice though, not having to configure yet another tool is a big deal:

> my editor and git commit hooks are just not setup to go and run jq

+1, this is often the difference between using a mediocre tool and nothing.

And I think for JSON data, a formulaic pretty-printer is maybe a better starting point than clang-format's context-sensitive optimizing approach.

---

But we'll have to deal with the fact that this isn't going to format the way all people like. It seems reasonable to to expect to be able to:

- format `["foo"]` on one line
- indent with tab characters rather than spaces
- format "JSON" that is incomplete/broken/has extensions (see JSON5)

With my maintainer-of-`Support/JSON` hat on, I don't like the idea of these features being shoehorned into the library to make clang-format an incrementally more featureful JSON formatter. They're likely to lead to a lot of conceptual+implementation+API complexity in a library that solves its primary use cases quite well and simply.

---

So if the plan is to

- use this implementation to bootstrap JSON-in-clang-format
- with a firm intention of replacing it with parsing/formatting logic that lives inside clang-format itself
- long-term, maybe making use of `Support/JSON` long-term for some low level bits (normalizing string tokens?) but not where flexibility is needed

then I think this is great. However I'm a bit leery if the plan is "land this a MVP, and then play it by ear".


Repository:
  rG LLVM Github Monorepo

CHANGES SINCE LAST ACTION
  https://reviews.llvm.org/D93528/new/

https://reviews.llvm.org/D93528