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…”

  • Ethan@programming.devEnglish
    32·
    5 days ago

    That’s an artifact of JavaScript, not JSON. The JSON spec states that numbers are a sequence of digits with up to one decimal point. Implementations are not obligated to decode numbers as floating point. Go will happily decode into a 64-bit int, or into an arbitrary precision number.

    • Aux@lemmy.world
      13·
      4 days ago

      What that means is that you cannot rely on numbers in JSON. Just use strings.

      • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        Unless you’re dealing with some insanely flexible schema, you should be able to know what kind of number (int, double, and so on) a field should contain when deserializing a number field in JSON. Using a string does not provide any benefits here unless there’s some big in your deserialzation process.

        • Aux@lemmy.world
          1·
          3 days ago

          What’s the point of your schema if the receiving end is JavaScript, for example? You can convert a string to BigNumber, but you’ll get wrong data if you’re sending a number.

          • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
            1·
            3 days ago

            I’m not following your point so I think I might be misunderstanding it. If the types of numbers you want to express are literally incapable of being expressed using JSON numbers then yes, you should absolutely use string (or maybe even an object of multiple fields).