Why were specific built-in parsers per read -m removed?

[takusuman]

I was thinking more recently on this matter.
Why was the JSON parser dropped? I remember it having some bugs and crashes, it wasn't stable, but was it really difficult to fix?
I can imagine the .ini parser being a little bit "crude" and not supporting some variations in the format, but I haven't tested it.
If one put effort into fixing these, would they be merged again?

This is just a couple of questions, not actually an issue with this project. It's just because I think it would be fairly interesting to have built-in JSON in the Korn Shell instead of parsing it manually --- I even tried it once --- or using jq, which is an external binary and will be obviously slower.

[McDutchie]

The JSON parser and other 93v- beta functionality were not dropped, they were never part of our repo to begin with, because ksh 93u+m was forked from ksh 93u+ 2012-08-01, the last "stable" version. This is because the experience with ksh2020 made us think the 93v- beta was too buggy to be a good base to start from.

Even now, years later, I'm far too busy fixing bugs to think about adding significant new functionality.

I'm open to things like the JSON parser being backported and merged into the dev branch of 93u+m (which will become 93u+m/1.1 or perhaps 2.0), but I'm unlikely to get around to it myself any time soon -- particularly as we'll also need the time and resources to fix the inevitable bugs in that beta-quality code.

[takusuman]

The JSON parser and other 93v- beta functionality were not dropped, they were never part of our repo to begin with

I know, I just questioned here because it's the only significant team maintaining ksh93.

I'm open to things like the JSON parser being backported and merged into the dev branch of 93u+m

I remember it being really, really unstable before being removed, like segfaulting when trying to parse some files, and not being so fast to standards.
I could start doing something --- even though I'm not sure where it was implemented ---, but I will be inevitably extremely busy in the next two weeks or so.
Oh, by the way, would platform-specific optimizations be welcome? Like SIMD or such.