Not today...

This post is only to present a small project and the reasons behind it. Hope it can help other people.

Why this project

I am massively using jq in my shell scripts to deal with APIs. It is a powerfull tool and really help my day to day work. A few weeks ago I had to do the same kind of operations on a Yaml file, I started looking out there for alternative, and found some tooling which are translating Yaml to Json then push it to jq: here is an example.

I liked the idea, simple and easy, however, it relies on python, and even worse it has python dependencies. This will bring not only a full python VM (which is more than 30MB) but also a whole python toolchain to get those dependencies.

All the other solutions where relying on a VM based language and a full set of dependencies, it was a no-go.

The project

First, I needed a decision about which language, choices were Rust, Go, C++, C; all able to provide me with a single binary. Go was quick to eliminate as I did not want a 10MB binary for such a simple thing. My C and C++ skills are super rusty (no pun intended here), and the toolchain is a bit hard to manage.

During my search for a Yaml to Json converter I came accross serde. This library seems to provide everything I need and was all writen in pure Rust.

I ended up plumbing only 10 lines of code:

extern crate serde_json;
extern crate serde_yaml;
use std::io::{self};

fn main() {
	let value: serde_json::Value = serde_yaml::from_reader(io::stdin()).unwrap();
	// Write out the JSON.
	println!("{}", value.to_string());
}

TADA! It works! I did not even have to learn Rust syntax at all. The only knowledge I had to collect was around the Cargo toolchain, which was about 30 minutes of Googling. Last but not least, binary is only ~550KB which was exactly what I was aiming for.

It only support converting in one way and from stdin, but this is the bare minimum I needed. I may later add some features but for the moment this first version is really satisfying.