I've got one more opinion until next week: you should never use json for your config file. yes even if it's not supposed to be user facing.
some day someone is going to need to dig into the config to debug something and the least you can do is let them use comments
"so... json-with-comments?" no. it's not a real standard and also in this house we do not "throw good money after bad". make your config yaml. make your config .ini. make your config in sh. I don't care. you're parsing options it doesn't matter what it's in. so make it in something that both supports code comments and syntax highlighting.
just don't make it in JSON. or if you do, have the user facing portion be in literally anything else and then juice it into JSON in the background if you need to be a filthy little gremlin about it.
use ion instead. it's json but good. it supports comments, keys wizhout spaces don't need quotes, trailing commas don't bring zhe world to an end, it adds a few extra types (like date/times, binary blobs, and "annotations" which are really neat) wizhout adding too much bloat or making it hellish to parse, it has a schema specification (like json schema but an official part of zhe spec), it has a one-to-one binary representation zhat's more compact if you don't need human-readability, etc. it's a strict superset of json, meaning all valid json is also valid ion, so you can migrate existing files gradually. it's been around for several years and has libraries in several languages. it's good.
