Subject: Re: bug#70007: [PATCH] native JSON encoder

From: Mattias Engdegård <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 24 Aug 2024 21:45:57 +0200

24 aug. 2024 kl. 18.14 skrev Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>:

> We are very late in the release process to make such changes without
> reservations.  We should have discussed this much earlier, but that's
> water under the bridge.

Yes, sorry about not following this through in time. But here we are.

> Since this could potentially (albeit unlikely) break someone's code,
> I'm okay with making this change, but with a twist: let's have a
> variable which could be let-bound around the call to json-serialize,
> to make the result a multibyte string instead of the default unibyte.
> This is so if someone comes back crying that we broke his/her code,
> they could have an easy fire escape.

Sure, but it's a bit annoying to saddle us with some baggage that we never expect to be actually used.
And for that matter, it's no easier to bind a variable around the call than putting a call to `decode-coding-string` around it, is it? We could describe that in NEWS.

The null option is to do nothing and stick to what we have now. It's not a terrible choice either.

> P.S. Of course, the fact that the result is a unibyte string should be
> mentioned in the doc string.

Yes, definitely.