JSON vs YAML vs TOML vs CSV vs Protobuf: Developer's Guide (opens in new tab)

You're building an API and defaulting to JSON because everyone does. The endpoint works fine. Then it needs to handle large payloads at high throughput, and suddenly the bottleneck is payload parsing. Or you're writing a config file and three months later a new team member can't figure out what half of it means because there are no comments allowed. Or you're exporting data to finance and the CSV import broke because one field contained a comma. Every data format is a tradeoff. JSON is not al...