> On Apr 10, 2017, at 02:52, David Hart via swift-evolution > <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote: > >> >> On 10 Apr 2017, at 11:36, piotr gorzelany via swift-evolution >> <swift-evolution@swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>> wrote: >> >> This is a really great proposal. As an iOS developer I work with JSON almost >> every day since most mobile apps communicate with a backend through JSON >> messages. It's good to see that better JSON support is coming to Foundation >> so we don't have to rely on third party libraries. >> >> That being said, there is one thing I don't like which is that the JSON >> encoding function returns Data and the decoding function takes Data. >> >> It would be really great if the Foundation team could introduce a dedicated >> type of JSON. >> There are several advantages of working with a dedicated type. >> - The underlying data is always valid JSON >> - You can extend this type in the future with helper methods for >> manipulating JSON >> - It makes it explicit what you are dealing with >> >> A good analogy is the URL type. You could represent an URL with a String or >> Data type, but by introducing a dedicated type you have the full advantages >> mentioned above. Data on the other hand is like a generic container which >> you cannot easily extend with URL or JSON specific methods. >> >> Having a dedicated JSON type is also one of the reasons third party >> libraries like SwiftyJSON are so popular. It makes it super easy to >> manipulate JSON structures. And sometimes developers like would like to >> manipulate JSON directly. > > I don’t think it would be a good thing to have this in Foundation. Foundation > needs to push developers towards adopting best practices, and manipulating > JSON directly instead of going through Codable’s strong-typing is not > necessarily recommended. I’m not saying it doesn’t have its uses. But it’s > usefulness is definitely narrow now once we have Codable. I think this is > something that should stay in a third-party library.
I haven't thought heavily about this, but the thoughts that I have say that JSON just isn't a good type in Swift. It's not an efficient in-memory representation and it's not a convenient structural representation (because of the use of either 'Any' or 'JSON' in the recursive position). I'll admit that sometimes you're handed some JSON and you want to extract a little bit of information out of it without building a typed representation of the whole thing, but that still seems like something that doesn't need to be the common path. Jordan
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