Re: JSON/YAML/TOML/etc. parsing performance

[Mark Oteiza <mvoteiza@udel.edu>]

Philipp Stephani <p.stephani2@gmail.com> writes:

> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> schrieb am So., 17. Sep. 2017 um 21:05 Uhr:
>
>  > From: Philipp Stephani <p.stephani2@gmail.com>
>  > Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2017 18:46:45 +0000
>  >
>  > I don't know much about the others, but given the importance of JSON as data exchange and serialization
>  > format, I think it's worthwhile to invest some time here. I've implemented a wrapper around the json-c library
>  > (license: Expat/X11/MIT), resulting in significant speedups using the test data from
>  > https://github.com/miloyip/nativejson-benchmark: a factor of 3.9 to 6.4 for parsing, and a factor of 27 to 67 for
>  > serializing. If people agree that this is useful I can send a patch.
>
>  Before we make a decision on which library to use, I'd prefer some
>  kind of survey of available free software libraries, including their
>  popularity and development activity.  The survey doesn't have to be
>  exhaustive, but I think we should compare at least a few candidates.
>  We already have 2, so maybe we should start by comparing them.
>
> Sure, I've made a quick overview based on
> https://github.com/miloyip/nativejson-benchmark. I've only used the
> libraries that are written in C and have been tested in that
>  benchmark; it's still quite a few. I've checked the conformance and
> speed metrics from the benchmark as well as number of GitHub stars (as
> proxy for popularity) and number of commit in the last month (as proxy
> for development activity): Here are the results:
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTqKxqo47s67L3EJ9AWvZclNuT2xbd9rgoRuJ_UYbXgnV171owr8h2mksHjrjNGADDR3DVTWQvUMBpe/pubhtml?gid=0&single=true

Thanks for coming up with these comparisons.

> Note that some of the libraries (jsmn, ujson4c) don't appear to
> support serialization at all; I'd suggest to avoid them, because we'd
> then need to wrap another library for serialization. Also, even though
> JSMN advertises itself as "world's fastest JSON parser", it's actually
> the slowest of the libraries in the survey. json-c appears to be
> reasonably conformant and fast for both parsing and serialization, and
> has by far the largest development activity.

I was a little confused how they got a "parsing" benchmark out of jsmn,
since all it does is tokenize.  No matter, it makes sense pursue
something that does both.