limactl ls --json emits a stream of objects instead of an array

[jandubois]

This makes is harder to parse it using JSON.parse from JavaScript:

$ limactl ls --json
{"name":"alpine","status":"Running","dir":"/Users/jan/.lima/alpine","arch":"x86_64","sshLocalPort":60020,"hostAgentPID":16450,"qemuPID":16451}
{"name":"default","status":"Running","dir":"/Users/jan/.lima/default","arch":"x86_64","sshLocalPort":60022,"hostAgentPID":13199,"qemuPID":13200}

Is there a reason not to wrap the objects in an array, making the output a valid JSON document?

[AkihiroSuda]

I prefer to use NDJSON (aka JSONlines, LDJSON) everywhere because

• Memory efficient for marshaling large arrays (limactl ls does not need to scale for more than 10 elements, though)
• Even if the process crashed, we can get some partial results
• Friendly to shell utilities such as grep. No need to install gron/ungron.

NDJSON is also used in the event API of the guestagent and the hostagent.

[AkihiroSuda]

There seems some libraries for parsing NDJSON/JSONlines/LDJSON with nodejs

• https://www.npmjs.com/package/ndjson
• https://www.npmjs.com/package/json-lines
• https://www.npmjs.com/package/ldjson

[ghost]

jq also parses NDJSON nicely:

limactl list --json | jq