@dominicm we considered transit, but it has some drawbacks
It's not human readable
And it requires an additional dependency
Maybe it could be used as an alternative transport mechanism
Is it very easy to write a transit parser in, say, elisp?
You would need a streaming json parser I think
Transit parsers are available on more platforms than edn parsers are, but if you do have to implement it I think it's as least as hard as writing an EDN parser. I agree with the other arguments.
the nice thing about the socket repl + blob approach is that each tool is free to make its own version of the blob. If dealing with EDN is too cumbersome in environment X, then make a blob that uses some other transport. Shouldn't be too hard.
I'm thinking of transit-json when I say it is easier to parse.
But perhaps that's just because I'm not thinking about the tagged part
Note that transit-json is not streamable, whereas Clojure's transit is. Got bitten by this. Current implementation I would add.