Jaxon dependency maintenance status

[thbar]

Jaxon is used in a couple of places in the library.

The thing is this library has not seen any commit in the last 2.5 years (https://github.com/boudra/jaxon).

I would suggest that we consider moving to something with a better maintenance ultimately, and try to reduce expanding the usage in instructor_ex.

Opening the issue to ensure we are all aware of that!

Related links:

• Streaming support michalmuskala/jason#25
• https://twitter.com/michalmuskala/status/1760717159167078864
• Add json module erlang/otp#8111 (linked above - not merged at time of writing, but supporting streaming if I read quickly)

[thmsmlr]

This is a great callout. I have a local branch with a prototype of implementing JSON Streaming myself.

That being said, this isn't a urgent concern for me as the JSON SPEC is unchanging and jaxon has quite a comprehensive test suite.

For me, the real reason to use change this bit of the library is to change how stream parsing actually works. Currently, when the accumulator is

{ "foo" : "ba

The stream parser only emits {, "foo", : as tokens.

Where as I'd like a stream parser that emits {, "foo", :, "ba so that I can do stream emits within a string as well.

To get this working "properly" with Jaxon was going to be a big pain. There is an alternative hacky solution where we just try parsing by appending a " and see if it's validish. But, that's jank for two reasons. First, is it possible to that appending a " can produce a valid, but different tokenstream? Second, is that although stream parsing is implemeneted as a continuation parser, the continuation fuction is hidden so you can't "fork" it in a low cost way AFAIK.

Anyways, that was more than you bargained for. When we revisit this code, i'm only going to make a change if we can also support streaming partial strings. That's a big feature in other language implementations of instructor.

[thbar]

That being said, this isn't a urgent concern for me as the JSON SPEC is unchanging and jaxon has quite a comprehensive test suite.

100% agreeing ; I was mostly opening the issue to ensure we do not expand the use unknowingly, as I wasn't aware of how aware you would be or not :-)

Anyways, that was more than you bargained for.

I do appreciate the depth of feedback you provided 😄 I will mull over this, and if I have actionable ideas, will not hesitate to contribute on this.