After having a very short discussion with Delix on youtube (see link below) on custom data storage formats, I started thinking. What are some useful ways of maintaining importers / exporters when you change your file format during the development of your game?
The most obvious solution would be to write different functions for file formats like exporterV1(), importerV1(), exporterV2(), importerV2(), etc. Then call the correct function based on some sort of header in your file. Like using the first byte(s) to store the version of the file format. However, this seems incredibly inefficient. Especially since you'll have to writer converter functions to translate between the file formats. I.e. v1tov2converter().
Usually when writing this kind of thing, a voice in the back of my head screams "there must be a better way of doing this", but I'm drawing a blank so far.
Naughty Dog seems to use scheme for describing both the data and how it should be read. However, my knowledge of scheme is non-existent so I have no clue how that would work. This would however, solve my problem, as the data would describe itself see reference.
What are, in your opinion, some of the clever ways you know of, to solve this issue?
As a response to a question in comments asked by @DMGregory: I'm mostly talking about changes during development of the game(engine). Changing file formats in production seems like a can of worms I would not like to open. Especially if your dealing with importer / exporters of safe game data.
