Re: Proposal to use JSON for Postgres Parser format

Michel Pelletier <pelletier(dot)michel(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> I would like to propose a discussion that in a future major release
> Postgres switch from this custom format to JSON.

There are certainly reasons to think about changing the node tree
storage format; but if we change it, I'd like to see it go to something
more compact not more verbose. JSON doesn't fit our needs all that
closely, so some things like bitmapsets would become a lot longer;
and even where the semantics are pretty-much-the-same, JSON's
insistence on details like quoting field names will add bytes.
Perhaps making the physical storage be JSONB not JSON would help that
pain point. It's still far from ideal though.

Maybe a compromise could be found whereby we provide a conversion
function that converts whatever the catalog storage format is to
some JSON equivalent. That would address the needs of external
code that doesn't want to write a custom parser, while not tying
us directly to JSON.

regards, tom lane