alt Hacker News> Everyone has access to a JSON5 parser.
That's just a lack of imagination. When you're making a product for teams that span everything from a brand new startup using the latest tooling to teams that are working on software that runs on embedded systems from the 90's, you need to consider things like this.
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I don't think this is true, and honestly, I think it would be a mistake to consider it - they can't serve everyone, down that path is madness. FWIW - I even have a JSON parser in my RTOS-that-must-run-in-less-than-512k.
I also think that target of "embedded systems from the 90's" makes no sense because the tooling for the embedded system, which is what would conceivably want to handle patch format, ran on the host, which easily had access to a JSON parser.
But let's assume it does matter - let's be super concrete - assume they want to serve 95-99% of the users of patch format (i doubt it's even that high).
Which exact pieces of software with even >1% market share that need to process patch format don't have access to a JSON parser?
There are json5 parsers written in C89 out there. And your embedded systems from the 90s probably doesn't have a JSON parser built in at all either... If you're going to build your own json parser, adding json5 support on top is really trivial.