TOON (Token-Oriented Object Notation) is a human-readable serialization format designed to minimize LLM token usage while preserving lossless round-trip conversion with JSON. This monorepo provides the reference TypeScript implementation (`@toon-format/toon`) and a CLI tool (`@toon-format/cli`) for encoding/decoding TOON. The library features streaming encode/decode, tabular forms for uniform data, normalization of special JavaScript values (BigInt, Date, Set, Map), security hardening against prototype pollution, and a replacer function with path tracking. The CLI supports stdin/stdout conversion, auto-detection by file extension, token statistics, and delimiter options. The repository also includes an extensive benchmark suite comparing TOON against JSON, YAML, XML, and CSV across token efficiency and retrieval accuracy using multiple LLMs (Claude, Gemini, GPT, Grok). Results show TOON matches JSON's accuracy while using ~43% fewer tokens. A documentation site with an interactive playground is provided via VitePress. The codebase is well-structured with clean abstractions, streaming APIs, and thorough testing, though it relies on an external spec repository and has a single author, creating bus factor risk.
This repository defines the Transit data interchange format (v0.8), a cross-language serialization specification for conveying values between applications. It does not contain any implementation code for reading or writing Transit; instead, it provides the authoritative specification (README.md), a comprehensive suite of example data files in multiple representations (EDN, JSON, verbose JSON, MessagePack), and a Clojure-based testing infrastructure to verify that third-party Transit implementations correctly encode/decode according to the spec. The test harness in `src/transit/verify.clj` orchestrates roundtrip tests by invoking external implementation processes (via `bin/verify`), using both hand-crafted corner cases and generative random data to ensure correctness. The repo acts as the central reference for all Transit implementations across languages including Clojure, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and others.