Json

• Adding Types to JSON with Dhall

  A few months ago I wrote a post asking whether there’s something better than JSON. Two configuration languages that sit above JSON kept coming up: CUE and Dhall. Both give you the things JSON lacks when you author config by hand, and both compile down to plain JSON, YAML, or whatever your services actually read. I spent more time with CUE back then and never gave Dhall a real look. This post is me going back for that second look, because the one feature I kept wanting was a type system over my config.

  JSON is the universal language of API payloads and config files, and I don’t want that to change. But as a format for authoring configuration by hand, it’s rough:

  • No comments.
  • No variables or functions, so you copy-paste the same block ten times.
  • No type system, so "8080" and 8080 look equally valid.
  • No imports, which is how you end up with a 2,000-line monolith nobody wants to touch.

  The usual escape hatch is a templating engine like Jinja or Helm, or a real programming language like Python or TypeScript that spits out JSON. That works, but you’ve traded one problem for a scarier one: your config generator is now Turing-complete. It can crash, hang in an infinite loop, or reach out and read some local environment variable, and it’ll do it at 2 AM when the pipeline runs.

  This is where Dhall comes in.

  What is Dhall?

  The short version: Dhall is JSON plus types, plus functions, plus imports. It’s a programmable, strongly-typed configuration language.

  The part I actually care about is what it doesn’t have. Dhall is not Turing-complete. No arbitrary recursion, no side effects. Every Dhall program is guaranteed to terminate. You get the abstraction power of a functional language like Haskell or Elm, with the guarantee that it will never hang your build. That’s a different trade than “just write a Python script.”

  The problem, in JSON

  Here’s a normal config.json for a microservice:

  {
    "serviceName": "payment-api",
    "port": 8080,
    "environment": "production",
    "database": {
      "host": "db.internal.net",
      "maxConnections": 50
    }
  }
  

  Three ways can be a problem in production: someone writes "port": "8080" and the service won’t boot, someone typos "prodution" and it silently runs in debug mode, or someone forgets maxConnections entirely and you get a null blowup at runtime. Nothing catches any of it until it’s live.

  The same thing, typed

  In Dhall you define the shape up front. Enums, record types, default values:

  -- schema.dhall
  let Environment = < Local | Staging | Production >
  
  let Database =
        { Type = { host : Text, maxConnections : Natural }
        , default = { maxConnections = 20 }
        }
  
  let Config =
        { Type =
            { serviceName : Text
            , port : Natural
            , environment : Environment
            , database : Database.Type
            }
        , default =
            { port = 8080, environment = Environment.Local }
        }
  
  in  { Environment, Database, Config }
  

  Now you author against that schema, and you get defaults and composition for free:

  -- config.dhall
  let Schema = ./schema.dhall
  
  let myConfig : Schema.Config.Type =
        Schema.Config.default
        // { serviceName = "payment-api"
           , environment = Schema.Environment.Production
           , database = Schema.Database.default // { host = "db.internal.net", maxConnections = 50 }
           }
  
  in  myConfig
  

  Misspell Production, or pass "8080" as a string, and Dhall throws a type error before a single line of JSON is generated. Hopefully the benfit is now clear; adding a type safety layer to your config files.

  Compiling down to JSON

  You don’t ship Dhall to your services. You ship the JSON they already understand:

  brew install dhall-json
  dhall-to-json --file config.dhall
  

  Out comes clean, boring, standard JSON. Your services never know Dhall was involved. The part that I like is the safety lives at authoring time, and the runtime artifact stays dumb.

  Two features worth knowing about

  Hermetic imports with hash pinning. Dhall can import from a URL, so shared utilities live in one place instead of being copy-pasted across five repos. To keep someone from swapping the file out from under you, you pin the import to a SHA-256 hash of its normalized form:

  let Prelude =
        https://prelude.dhall-lang.org/v22.0.0/package.dhall
          sha256:10db4c919c25e4d262db3ed0d1d6120da3e3906673f00e3012c1d14e1963976a
  

  If the remote content changes, the hash won’t match and the build fails. The hash above is just an example, and each Prelude version has its own, so don’t copy it by hand. dhall freeze --inplace config.dhall computes the correct hashes for whatever you’ve imported and pins them automatically.

  Exhaustive matching with merge. When you map a union type to output, Dhall makes you handle every variant:

  let getLogPrefix = \(env : Environment) ->
        merge
          { Local = "[DEV] ", Staging = "[STAGE] ", Production = "[PROD] " }
          env
  

  Add a QA variant later, and every merge block that touched Environment fails to compile until you deal with it. No forgotten switch case slipping into production. The compiler keeps a running list of everything you now owe it.

  Is it worth it?

  	Raw JSON	Dhall
  Type safety	None, fails at runtime	Static, at compile time
  Comments & logic	No	Yes
  Termination	N/A	Guaranteed
  Dependency pinning	No	SHA-256
  Output	Consumed directly	Compiles to JSON/YAML/TOML

  For a two-key config file, it doesn’t make sense, but once you’re staring down Kubernetes manifests, a pile of near-identical microservice configs, or anything where a typo takes down a service, the calculus changes. You keep clean static JSON as the thing your services actually read, and you move all the ways-to-get-it-wrong to a place where a compiler catches them first.

  ---

  Sources

  • Dhall Language Tutorial & Cheatsheet: records, union types, default overrides, dhall-to-json, and dhall freeze.
  • Dhall language standard on GitHub: the non-Turing-complete design and the semantic integrity hash spec.

  ---

  I’d appreciate a follow. You can subscribe with your email below. The emails go out once a week, or you can find me on Mastodon at @[email protected].

  Jul 11, 2026 DevOps Programming Json Configuration Dhall

  Enjoyed this?

• I Benchmarked JSON Parsing in Bun, Node, Rust, and Go

  I’m just going to start posting about JSON everyday. Well ok, maybe not every day, but for the next few days at least. Later this week I’ve committed to writing a guide on getting started with CLIs for non-programmers, so stay tuned for that.

  This morning I benchmarked JSON parsing across four runtimes: Bun, Node, Rust, and Go.

  The Results

  • Bun is the overall winner on large files — 307-354 MB/s, beating even Rust’s serde_json for untyped parsing
  • Rust wins on small/nested data (225 MB/s small, 327 MB/s nested) due to low overhead
  • Node is close behind Bun — V8’s JSON.parse is very optimized
  • Go is ~3x slower than the JS runtimes on large payloads (encoding/json is notoriously slow)
  • Memory: Bun reports 0 delta (likely GC reclaims before measurement), Rust’s tracking allocator shows the true heap cost (73-96MB), Go uses 52-65MB

  Rust’s numbers were the most honest here since the tracking allocator catches everything. We should take Bun result with grain of salt because benchmarking memory in GC’d languages is tricky.

  The json parser in v8 in node is the exact same as what is in Chrome…

  Here’s the full test results if you want to dig into the numbers yourself.

  More JSON content coming soon. You’ve been warned.

  Mar 31, 2026 Programming Bun Node Json Benchmarks Rust Go

  Enjoyed this?

• Is There Something Better Than JSON?

  Have you ever looked at a JSON file and thought, “There has to be something better than this”? I have.

  JSON has served us well. It works with everything, and it’s human readable. It’s a decent default, don’t get me wrong, but the more you use it, you’ll find its limitations to be quite painful. So before we answer the question of whether there’s anything better, we should describe what’s actually wrong with JSON.

  The Problems with JSON

  First, there’s no type system. No datetimes, no real integers, no structs, no unions, no tuples. If you need types, and you almost always do, you’re on your own.

  Second, JSON is simple, which sounds like a feature until you try to store anything complicated in it. You end up inventing your own schema, and the schema tooling out there (JSON Schema, etc.) gets verbose fast. Because the spec is so loose, validation can be inconsistent across implementations.

  There’s more: fields can be reordered, you have to receive the entire document before you can start verifying it, and there are no comments. You can’t leave a note for the next person explaining why a config value is set a certain way. That’s a real problem for anything that lives in version control.

  The Machine-Readable Alternatives

  Now, there are plenty of binary serialization formats that solve some of these issues. Protobuf, Cap’n Proto, CBOR, MessagePack, BSON. They’re all interesting and have their place. But they’re machine readable, not human readable. You can’t just open one up in your editor and make sense of it. So let’s set those aside.

  The question I’m more interested in is: is there something better than JSON that you can still read and edit as a text file?

  It turns out there are two solid options.

  Dhall

  Dhall is a programmable configuration language. Think of it as JSON with all the things you wish JSON had: functions, types, and imports. You can convert JSON to Dhall and back, and it’s just a text file you can open in any editor. The name comes from a character in an old video game, and the language itself is interesting enough that it’s worth your time to explore.

  CUE

  CUE stands for Configure, Unify, and Execute. It’s similar to Dhall in that it fills the gaps JSON leaves behind, like types, validation, and constraints, while staying human readable. Where CUE really pulls ahead is in its feature set. You can import Protobuf definitions, generate JSON Schema, validate existing configs, and a lot more. In terms of raw capabilities, CUE has more going on than Dhall.

  JSON isn’t going anywhere. But if you’re looking for something interesting to explore, check out both of these. They make great fun little side projects.

  Mar 29, 2026 DevOps Programming Json Configuration

  Enjoyed this?