Top 4 json-alternative Open-Source Projects

cbor

4 659 8.6 Go

CBOR codec (RFC 8949) with CBOR tags, Go struct tags (toarray, keyasint, omitempty), float64/32/16, big.Int, and fuzz tested billions of execs.

Project mention: Rob Pike: Gobs of data (2011) | news.ycombinator.com | 2023-12-04

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

nestedtext

8 334 7.6 Python

Human readable and writable data interchange format
InfluxDB

www.influxdata.com sponsored

Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
ekon

4 25 0.0 C

A JSON alternative for sane people. Combination of simplicity & power. Check it out!

Project mention: TOML: Tom's Obvious Minimal Language | news.ycombinator.com | 2023-05-21

Java-SerialX

2 1 0.6 HTML

Store Java objects into JSON or any format you want! SerialX is a powerful lightweight utility library to serialize Java objects programmatically via tweakable recursive descent parser for custom domain-specific languages!

NOTE: The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars. The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or since we started tracking (Dec 2020).