Hi.
So i spent quite some time trying to get in use an existing JSON-parsing
libraries.
But surprisingly enough none seemed to be good enough.
Problems i met were like this:
1. Parsers are just slow.
- because they copy data - particularly key names and values.
- because they use memory allocation/deallocations
- because they convert numbers from strings to some numeric formats.
Not that i criticise them - it's all mostly because authors of
these libraries
were concentrating on the ease of use for the inexperienced user.
2. They have to implement the support for different character sets, and
cannot use our code for charsets directly. That leads to further
slowdown
of execution and some inconsistencies with the existing behaviour.
3. Their interface is inconvenient. In order to implement the required
JSON functions
we'd like to start/stop parsing on various stages, skip parts of
JSON, insert
something to the found place etc. With the usual interface of the
libraries
doing all this looks really ugly and inefficient. So that MySQL
doesn't even
try to implement this - it only uses the library to convert the
JSON to internal
format and then only operates with that internal.
4. Libraries tend to have their own ways of reporting errors while we'd
like use our
error messages. Now MySQL just prints the library-generated
messages, they cannot
translate or somehow modyfy them.
5. We have to parse not only JSON, but also json-paths, as parts of
various JSON functions.
Libraries don't usually parse the json-path. Partly because these
paths can be very different in
various applications.
Still parts of the path (strings to be specific) should be parsed
just as JSON, and it'd be good
to use the JSON parser for it, which can require ugly tricks. Like
MySQL constructs JSON
from that piece of json-path to be able to feed that to the JSON
parser.
Above all that, i must note that the JSON is pretty simple and compact
as a data format. And
i seriously belive handling it can be done with great efficiency.
So i decided to invest in local JSON parser, taking JSON_CHECKER as a
source of inspiration.
That JSON_CHECKER was produced by JSON.org itself, is really fast and
nice. But it's not
a parser - it just checks if the text makes the correct JSON.
Well it took some time, but now ready. Now opening it for review.
Best regards.
HF
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