sia VS benchmark

Prior to version v0.11.0, Clio used JSON for serialization. JSON is available everywhere and it’s fairly fast, so at first, it might sound like a good idea to go with JSON. Unfortunately, as soon as we start serializing custom types with JSON, its performance degrades to the point that it’s not efficient anymore. To solve this issue, I created a serialization library for JavaScript named Sia, and to boost its serialization performance to the next level, I also designed a new text encoding which I called utfz. I spent over a year optimizing these two libraries, and as a result, managed to make Sia so fast that the pure JavaScript version of it beats even the performance of the native serialization libraries available for Node.js!

First of all, I should mention that JavaScript, contradictory to the common belief, is actually a very fast programming language. Since Clio *compiles *to JavaScript, the compiler can apply compile-time optimizations to the generated JavaScript. In the case of the above example, tail call optimization is applied to the Fibonacci function. You can find the source code for the benchmark here.