Thanks for the positive feedback! The documentation needs a bit of revision, but I agree there's a lot of configuration file formats that should be supported with language servers that might not necessarily have rich AST parsing as part of their contents.

That’s very interesting, but systemd is pretty pervasive I really don’t think it’s going anywhere anytime soon for better or for worse. Language servers aren't just adopted in vscode, other editors use them in fact. I am not a VS Code user myself, but I appreciate their implementation of the language server protocol, they did a fantastic job with that.

I was not involved in the decision, but my guess is:

- xml is too verbose

- yaml is too complex + suffers some notable ambiguity issues

- json isn't very human friendly (no comments)

- a lot of other linux software uses ini-style configs

INI format a "custom format"? It dates back to the 80's, maybe before that. It was the configuration file format.

OTOH, JSON is not a configuration file format. XML might be, but when I see what some people do with XML (ant, maven builds are abysmal, although msbuild xml files are managable), then I want to click unsubscribe.

I'm happy they've chosen INI.

the ini-like format was used a lot on DOS and Windows internals.

Which was a part of the argumentation that systemd is very “windows” in its design (hidden errors, monolithic design).

Definitely an established standard (though not as much on UNIX-likes) before TOML was popularised though.