By Dev | 1 August, 2017
Wiring uses TOML as a way of writing meta data. TOML’s objectives are:
TOML aims to be a minimal configuration file format that’s easy to read due to obvious semantics. TOML is designed to map unambiguously to a hash table. TOML should be easy to parse into data structures in a wide variety of languages.
It has a nice spec at:
https://github.com/toml-lang/toml
and lots of interfaces.
Comparison with other formats
This is an excert from the TOML page:
In some ways TOML is very similar to JSON: simple, well-specified, and maps easily to ubiquitous data types. JSON is great for serializing data that will mostly be read and written by computer programs. Where TOML differs from JSON is its emphasis on being easy for humans to read and write. Comments are a good example: they serve no purpose when data is being sent from one program to another, but are very helpful in a configuration file that may be edited by hand.
The YAML format is oriented towards configuration files just like TOML. For many purposes, however, YAML is an overly complex solution. TOML aims for simplicity, a goal which is not apparent in the YAML specification: http://www.yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html
The INI format is also frequently used for configuration files. The format is not standardized, however, and usually does not handle more than one or two levels of nesting.