json VS Bitsery

I have not done a "desktop" program in 25+ years and never using C++ (or C), since then I'm mostly a web developer (PHP,Elixir, JS, Kotlin etc).

I'm currently doing a C++ audio plugin with the Juce framework.

This website has been a good resource, alongside https://www.learncpp.com

But I was actually close to give up before using those two things:

- https://github.com/nlohmann/json : my plugin use a json api backend and the Juce json implementation is atrocious (apparently because of being born in previous c++ version), but this library is GREAT.

- ChatGPT 4. I'm not sure I would have "succeeded" without it, at least not in a reasonable time frame. ChatGPT 3.5 is slow and does not give good results for my use case but 4 is impressive. And I use in a very dumb way, just posing question in the web UI. I probably could have it directly in MSVC?

Also I must say, for all its flaws, I have a renewed appreciation for doing UI on the web ;)

https://github.com/nlohmann/json works well for me

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.15) project(xrpc++ DESCRIPTION "C++ AT Protocol XRPC library" VERSION 1.0.0 LANGUAGES CXX) include(FetchContent) FetchContent_Declare(cpr GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/libcpr/cpr.git GIT_TAG 2553fc41450301cd09a9271c8d2c3e0cf3546b73) # The commit hash for 1.10.x. Replace with the latest from: https://github.com/libcpr/cpr/releases FetchContent_MakeAvailable(cpr) FetchContent_Declare(json URL https://github.com/nlohmann/json/releases/download/v3.11.2/json.tar.xz) FetchContent_MakeAvailable(json) add_library(${PROJECT_NAME} SHARED src/lexicon.cpp src/xrpc.cpp ) target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} PRIVATE cpr::cpr) target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} PRIVATE nlohmann_json::nlohmann_json) set_target_properties(${PROJECT_NAME} PROPERTIES VERSION ${PROJECT_VERSION}) set_target_properties(${PROJECT_NAME} PROPERTIES SOVERSION 1) target_include_directories(${PROJECT_NAME} PUBLIC include) set(CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE debug)

FetchContent_Declare(json URL https://github.com/nlohmann/json/releases/download/v3.11.2/json.tar.xz) FetchContent_MakeAvailable(json)

Here is one popular C++ library (nlohmann/json) removing its use.

Before going into binary serialization I suggest you to get comfortable with serialization to text. You can try to write your data to text files and read them in again. Then after you get an idea of how this works you can try to use a library that writes to XML or json, e.g. nlohmann json

Download the single header file json.hpp from https://github.com/nlohmann/json/releases and place it in your project directory or an include directory.

Exemple of a JSON library: https://github.com/nlohmann/json (For XML, there's tinyxml)

Thanks for sharing https://github.com/fraillt/bitsery it seems more powerful but require quite a boilerplate code for even very simple composite stuff. With ByteStream you can totally forget about deep you are in the data-structure hierarchy.

Bitsery is the closest I've seen to it, but you have to use extensions (which i can't yet figure out the API for) to make it achieve byte for byte compatbility

If size and performance matter, then take a look at bitsery. * it might be 9x+ faster than cereal and 18x faster than protobuf. * size-wise, you might save 20-30% by default * on top of that you additional might opt-in into: * bit-level serialization control (e.g. if your values are in the range 1000-2000 it will take you 10bits, or use VLE) * backward-forward compatibility support * pointer support, including raw pointers with the ability to provide custom allocator. * and powerful extensions system, which allows you to further customize things in any way you want it :)

About on par with nlohmann is a binary serialization lib called Bitsery. It's easy to use, and will be a lot more performant than json. The downside is that the serialized data won't be human readable.