xjson VS GJSON

Someone made a benchmark of serialization libraries in go [1], and I was surprised to see gobs is one of the slowest ones, specially for decoding. I suspect part of the reason is that the API doesn't not allow reusing decoders [2]. From my explorations it seems like both JSON [3], message-pack [4] and CBOR [5] are better alternatives.

By the way, in Go there are a like a million JSON encoders because a lot of things in the std library are not really coded for maximum performance but more for easy of usage, it seems. Perhaps this is the right balance for certain things (ex: the http library, see [6]).

There are also a bunch of libraries that allow you to modify a JSON file "in place", without having to fully deserialize into structs (ex: GJSON/SJSON [7] [8]). This sounds very convenient and more efficient that fully de/serializing if we just need to change the data a little.

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1: https://github.com/alecthomas/go_serialization_benchmarks

2: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/29766#issuecomment-45492...

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3: https://github.com/goccy/go-json

4: https://github.com/vmihailenco/msgpack

5: https://github.com/fxamacker/cbor

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6: https://github.com/valyala/fasthttp#faq

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7: https://github.com/tidwall/gjson

8: https://github.com/tidwall/sjson

I like jq, but jj is so fast it is my go-to for pretty printing large json blobs. Its parsing engine is available as a standalone google module, and I've used it in a few projects where I needed faster parsing than encoding/json:

https://github.com/tidwall/gjson

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I don't think there is a way to sort an array, though. However, there is an option to have keys sorted. Personally, I don't think there is much annoyance in that. One could just pipe `jj` output to `sort | uniq -c`.

[0]: https://github.com/tidwall/gjson/blob/master/SYNTAX.md

I’m using GJSON, so far so good!

https://github.com/tidwall/gjson is a relatively sensible library if this is something you need to deal with and the structure is actually unknowable.

one way could be you peek method using sth like https://github.com/tidwall/gjson

That’s because Go is a statically typed language. If you want to easily access the data, you need to know the structure, if you don’t know the structure, then you’re going to have to jump through hoops to get at the data. I would probably try using https://github.com/tidwall/gjson if I were you.