idea: json error output for consumption by tools

[sbarzowski]

To avoid the need to parse custom format (and worrying about colons in filenames etc.).

[sparkprime]

It would be easy, but a richer library interface would also satisfy this use case, so probably not necessary.

[sbarzowski]

Yeah, the use cases are largely overlapping, I agree.

There are good reasons to run it as a command rather than link to a library, though. Most obvious case for that is the formatter. So for example it's tricky to pin a specific version of formatter per-project when editor plugins etc. link to it directly.

[cpitclaudel]

That would be great. For UIs, a command line interface that produces e.g. JSON is much nicer than parsing plain text, and a library requires maintaining a wrapper to invoke, which is a non-trivial added cost (especially for tools that deal with many languages).