Douglas Crockford addressed this many years ago: write your human readable config with comments and run it through a pre-processor to strip them out before handing the config to a JSON parser. Seems like almost no one picked up on the idea.

That is such a horrible non-solution. It breaks all tooling which isn't aware of your particular preprocessor and adds a compilation step to every configuration.

> write your human readable config with comments

The question then becomes: what format is that?

That avoids one of the benefits of having a text based format; I would use TER and convert to DER (where TER is a text format and DER is a binary format, and which is what I do with some of my programs).

(Text formats do have some benefits, but binary formats have different benefits.)

> Seems like almost no one picked up on the idea.

Seems to me more like almost no one thought the idea was any good.

Use Lua tables. Lua's parser is smaller than many JSON parsers, the syntax is almost the same and you can use comments.

On the web? In wasm? I'd much rather use a new format. MAML's parser is 2kb of js gzipped according to the repo and very fast.

If that matters, the just bite the bullet and use JSON, which is supported in every browser in existence and has a parser library in every language worth using.

Use a '$comment' key in objects, which has the advantage of being preserved across a decoding-encoding round-trip.

JSON5 is what that is called and it already has wide support.

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