Welcome Go Team!

[johannschopplich]

Hi @bpradana, and @alpkeskin! 👋

The official Go implementation repo is now ready. All of you have been invited as maintainers. I didn't ask you before hand, so I hope this message finds you well and you're interested in working together on the official TOON implementation for Go. 🙂

What's Ready

This Repository

You now have full access to toon-format/toon-go. This is where you can build the consolidated Go implementation together.

Language-Agnostic Tests

The spec repository now includes language-agnostic test fixtures that all implementations can use:

• Encoding tests: JSON → TOON conversion (tests/fixtures/encode/)
• Decoding tests: TOON → JSON parsing (tests/fixtures/decode/)
• Error cases: Validation and strict mode checks
• Edge cases: All specification corner cases

These JSON fixtures ensure consistency across all language implementations and make it easy to validate spec compliance.

Next Steps

Here's how to move forward:

1. Technical Evaluation (async via issues):
   • Review existing Go TOON implementations (if any)
   • Discuss parser architecture (manual vs. generated)
   • Propose API design that feels idiomatic to Go
   • Plan testing strategy and milestones

Note

You can touch every file in this repo – I've only set up a bare minimum Go structure. Feel free to challenge everything!

2. Initial Setup:

   • Finalize project structure and package organization
   • Set up CI/CD with GitHub Actions
   • Integrate the spec repo's test fixtures
   • Configure linting (golangci-lint) and formatting
   • Establish contribution guidelines

3. Collaborate:

   • Use issues and PRs for design discussions
   • Work async across timezones
   • Equal ownership and decision-making

Key Priorities

Here's what we should align on:

• ✅ Full SPEC.md compliance using the language-agnostic tests
• ✅ Go modules for dependency management
• ✅ Idiomatic Go code following standard conventions
• ✅ CI with GitHub Actions validating spec compliance
• ✅ Support for currently supported Go versions (1.21+)
• ✅ Clear documentation and Go-native API design
• ✅ Zero external dependencies for core functionality (stdlib only)

Future milestones to discuss:

• Custom marshaler/unmarshaler interfaces (similar to json.Marshaler)
• Performance optimizations and benchmarking
• Support for encoding.TextMarshaler/TextUnmarshaler
• Streaming decoder for large inputs
• Integration with popular Go frameworks

Team Work

Please be kind to each other. If something is off or you experience troubles in the team, please DM me and we'll get this sorted out.

Let's Get Started

Feel free to open issues to kick off discussions about:

• Parser implementation strategy (hand-written vs. generated)
• Package structure and exported API design
• How to integrate the spec test fixtures into go test
• Performance goals and benchmarking approach
• Documentation structure (pkg.go.dev + examples)

Thank you all for stepping up to collaborate on this. Looking forward to what you're going to build! 🎉

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P.S. – The package will automatically appear on pkg.go.dev once we push the first tagged release. Or am I wrong and I have to set up environment secrets like for npm, Crates or PyPi registries? I'd love to hear from you how to best approach this! 🚀