Yes, other formats were considered. There is some irony here, as I've been a vocal critic of JSON in the past (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/may-time-stop-usin

Yes, other formats were considered. There is some irony here, as I've been a vocal critic of JSON in the past (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/may-time-stop-using-json-sander-mertens/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/may-time-stop-using-json-sand...). I ultimately went with JSON because it's ubiquitous, it has been used for similar purposes (NPM) and it has a great parser (parson) that was easy to embed without adding more dependencies to bake. Time will tell whether JSON scales, but so far it has held up pretty well. Bake has been used by small & big organizations, while building large numbers of packages simultaneously (150+). The most complex bake project.json I've seen was still far less verbose than the average CMake file (using CMake as a benchmark since it has been widely adopted).