Welcome TOON Dart Team!

[johannschopplich]

Hi @Tushargupta9800 and @wisamidris77! 👋

I'm reaching out to bring together the Dart community's TOON efforts. @Tushargupta9800, you've already contributed to the community-driven repo, and @wisamidris77, I saw your Dart implementation from some weeks ago. To prevent ecosystem fragmentation, I'd love for you both to join forces on the official implementation.

Both of you are now invited as maintainers to toon-format/toon-dart.

What's Ready

This Repository

The toon-dart package already has one commit with initial encoder/decoder functionality (thanks, @Tushargupta9800!). You both now have full access to build on this foundation together.

Language-Agnostic Tests

The spec repository now includes language-agnostic test fixtures that all implementations can use:

• Encoding tests: JSON → TOON conversion (tests/fixtures/encode/)
• Decoding tests: TOON → JSON parsing (tests/fixtures/decode/)
• Error cases: Validation and strict mode checks
• Edge cases: All specification corner cases

These JSON fixtures ensure consistency across all language implementations and make it easy to validate spec compliance.

Next Steps

Here's how to move forward:

1. Technical Evaluation (async via issues):
   • Review the existing commit and both of your implementations
   • Identify strengths and learnings from each approach
   • Decide on the best path forward (merge approaches, extend existing, etc.)
   • Discuss testing strategy, API design, and milestones

Note

You can touch every file in this repo – feel free to challenge everything and make it the best Dart implementation possible!

2. Finalize Setup:

   • Finalize project structure (dart analyze, formatting, linting)
   • Integrate the spec repo's test fixtures
   • Set up CI with GitHub Actions
   • Establish contribution guidelines

3. Collaborate:

   • Use issues and PRs for design discussions
   • Work async across timezones
   • Equal ownership and decision-making

Key Priorities

Here's what we're aiming for:

• ✅ Full SPEC.md compliance using the language-agnostic tests
• ✅ Idiomatic Dart code following pub.dev best practices
• ✅ Type safety and null safety enforcement
• ✅ CI with GitHub Actions validating spec compliance
• ✅ Support for Dart 3.0+ (leveraging modern language features)
• ✅ Clear docs and examples
• ✅ High pub.dev score (formatting, documentation, analysis)

Future considerations:

• Performance optimizations
• Streaming support for large datasets
• Integration with common Dart frameworks (Flutter, server-side)

Team Work

Please be kind to each other. If something is off or you experience troubles in the team, please DM me and we'll get this sorted out.

Let's Get Started

Feel free to open issues to kick off discussions about:

• How to best combine your existing work
• Project structure and tooling decisions
• How to integrate the spec test fixtures
• API design for idiomatic Dart

Thank you both for stepping up to collaborate on this. Looking forward to what you're going to build! 🎉

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P.S. – The toon_format package is already reserved on pub.dev. Once we're ready to publish, I'll add you both as uploaders.