It’s gonna be a bog-standard Android device with some software modified/removed.

Really? That would be heavily antithetical to everything they do. I expect it would be a Linux distro (like PostmarketOS) with some blobs removed etc.

I mean, it in a very literal way the parent project of GTK, and therefore indirectly responsible for GNOME, so that kind of checks out. I use it quite often though, and you can learn it to do what you wanna do.

But Nix uses a normal string when passing into TOML, so I do have to escape anyways

What do you mean by that? You are always able to just use the '' strings instead of the " strings, they are just different syntax for the same underlying type. Or are you just using lib.generators.toINI without any arguments? Maybe try something like this:

toTomlEscapeBackslashes = toINI {
  mkKeyValue = mkKeyValueDefault { mkValueString = x: lib.escape [ ''\'' ] (toString x); } "=";
}

This will escape the values, like this:

nix-repl> :print toTomlEscapeBackslashes { my.regex = ''foo\nbar''; }
[my]
regex=foo\\nbar

I think they’re often the same client.

When you spend a couple months making sure that your app is formatted, linted, memory-safe, is modular and extensible, has 100% unit test coverage and a comprehensive integration test suite, checks all that on CI, has fully automated CD, blue-green deployments, deployment monitoring, and finally paid an external consultant for a security audit, but it lacks that one feature that the client actually wanted (but didn’t tell you to focus on), they will get angry. After all, they paid you a bunch of cash and all you have to show for it is an unfinished product.

But then if you quickly slap together two perl scripts which spit out non-compliant HTML and then plop it on Apache running on a Ubuntu box in your garage last updated 3 years ago, the client is super happy because it actually does what they want and you did it for cheap.

And this sums up the state of current technology.

Damn I kinda want a CRT now (just for nostalgia purposes).

I can’t go back to parsers with grammar definitions after using parser combinators; it just feels so unelegant and verbose. I guess Rust doesn’t have monadic syntax sugar like more functional languages, so it makes parsers in Nom a bit more ugly than Parsec, but I still prefer it.