I used to develop game engines when I was starting to learn programming. First C then C++. I knew JSON and there's an excelent header-only library for C++. Howe

I used to develop game engines when I was starting to learn programming. First C then C++. I knew JSON and there's an excelent header-only library for C++. However, I quickly learned from the indie gamedev community that parsing y=x always solves most of your problems, and it's quite trivial to do it, specially if you're using Python. Certainly better than using a full blown programming language for conf files.