Meme transcription:
Panel 1: Bilbo Baggins ponders, “After all… why should I care about the difference between int and String?
Panel 2: Bilbo Baggins is revealed to be an API developer. He continues, “JSON is always String, anyways…”
To whoever does that, I hope that there is a special place in hell where they force you to do type safe API bindings for a JSON API, and every time you use the wrong type for a value, they cave your skull in.
Sincerely, a frustrated Rust dev
"Hey, it appears to be int most of the time except that one time it has letters."
throws keyboard in trash
Rust has perfectly fine tools to deal with such issues, namely enums. Of course that cascades through every bit of related code and is a major pain.
Sadly it doesn't fix the bad documentation problem. I often don't care that a field is special and either give a string or number. This is fine.
What is not fine, and which should sentence you to eternal punishment, is to not clearly document it.
Don't you love when you publish a crate, have tested it on thousands of returned objects, only for the first issue be "field is sometimes null/other type?". You really start questioning everything about the API, and sometimes you'd rather parse it as serde::Value and call it a day.
True, and also true.
Relax, it's just JSON. If you wanted to not be stringly-typed, you'd have not used JSON.
(though to be fair, I hate it when people do bullshit types, but they got a point in that you ought to not use JSON in the first place if it matters)
As if I had a choice. Most of the time I'm only on the receiving end, not the sending end. I can't just magically use something else when that something else doesn't exist.
Heck, even when I'm on the sending end, I'd use JSON. Just not bullshit ones. It's not complicated to only have static types, or having discriminant fields
You HAVE to. I am a Rust dev too and I'm telling you, if you don't convert numbers to strings in json, browsers are going to overflow them and you will have incomprehensible bugs. Json can only be trusted when serde is used on both ends
"1" + "1"
"11"
strings are in base two, got it
Wouldn't the answer be "10" in that case?
yes, if I could do maths
1+1=11 means base 1
How so?
1 11 111 1111 11111 111111
That's base 1. By convention, because it doesn't really fit the pattern of positional number systems as far as I can tell, but it gets called that.
Oh, I get it, was reading as base 2 and confused by that. Essentially Roman numerals without all the fancy shortcuts.
Based
That's unary.
These JSON memes got me feeing like some junior dev out there is upset because they haven't read and understood the docs.
Comments? Comments? Who needs comments?
CBOR for life, down with JSON.
If you're moving away from text formats, might as well use a proper serialisation tool like protobuf...
Hell, no. If I wanted to save bytes, I’d use a binary format, or just fucking zip the JSON. Looking at a request-response pair and quickly understanding the transferred data is invaluable.
Explicit types are just laziness, you should be catching exceptions anyways.
I do. I return an error.
json doesn't have ints, it has Numbers, which are ieee754 floats. if you want to precisely store the full range of a 64 bit int (anything larger than 2^53 -1) then string is indeed the correct type
It's the API's job to validate it either way. As it does that job, it may as well parse the string as an integer.
I refuse to validate data that comes from the backend I specifically develop against.
A string that represents types...
If a item can have different type, those label fields are actually quite useful. So I don't see the problem
This is String - you’ve seen it before haven’t you, Gollum?
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