I do a lot of very low level programming with awful performance-maintenance trade-offs. Here's a great trick for a "binary" JSON: remove all of the extra whitespace, normalize your numbers, and the LZ4 the resulting string.

UTF-8 is already a great wire format.

I've never found a "binary JSON" that's significantly better than this; I mean you can beat it, but you need awkward encodings (prefix indices & other weird shit). You end up burning nearly-byte for any particularly clever integer encoding.

Most data structures are just nested arrays of integers. If you need an integer keyed OBJECT you're SOL, but I just play fiddly games with astral plane UTF-8 characters. (Yeah yeah yeah ad hoc encodings are nasty news.)

If you've got a BUTT LOAD of data just fire up a compressing SQLite DB like a normal human.

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a day ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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js8 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

If you're interested in performance, what about all the number conversion (to decimals, presumably) that is incurred with JSON?

	▲	thechao a day ago \| parent [-]
		If I'm interested in performance I'll build my data out of offset handles and lay everything down into a block and mmap() it around. That's parsing free, up to an htons() — but that's only a worst case scenario. Everything else is about not inventing something custom & being able to use easily vendored high-trust 3rd party tools. (In this case: a JSON library, LZ4, and/or SQLite.)