# Sonic A blazingly fast JSON serializing & deserializing library, accelerated by JIT(just-in-time compiling) and SIMD(single-instruction-multi-data). **WARNING: This is still in alpha stage, use with care !** ## Benchmarks For all sizes of json and all scenes of usage, Sonic performs almost best. - Small (400B, 11 keys, 3 levels) ![small benchmarks](bench-400B.png) - Medium (110KB, 300+ keys, 3 levels, with many quoted-json values) ![medium benchmarks](bench-110KB.png) - Large (550KB, 10000+ key, 6 levels) ![large benchmarks](bench-550KB.png) For a 13KB [TwitterJson](https://github.com/bytedance/sonic/blob/main/decoder/testdata_test.go#L19)(cpu i9-9880H, goarch amd64), Sonic is **1.5x** faster than [json-iterator](https://github.com/json-iterator/go) in decoding, **2.5x** faster in encoding. ```powershell BenchmarkDecoder_Generic_Sonic-16 10000 54309 ns/op 240.01 MB/s 46149 B/op 303 allocs/op BenchmarkDecoder_Generic_StdLib-16 10000 135268 ns/op 96.36 MB/s 50899 B/op 772 allocs/op BenchmarkDecoder_Generic_JsonIter-16 10000 96701 ns/op 134.80 MB/s 55791 B/op 1068 allocs/op BenchmarkDecoder_Binding_Sonic-16 10000 29478 ns/op 442.20 MB/s 26062 B/op 34 allocs/op BenchmarkDecoder_Binding_StdLib-16 10000 119348 ns/op 109.22 MB/s 10560 B/op 207 allocs/op BenchmarkDecoder_Binding_JsonIter-16 10000 37646 ns/op 346.25 MB/s 14673 B/op 385 allocs/op BenchmarkEncoder_Generic_Sonic-16 10000 25894 ns/op 503.39 MB/s 19096 B/op 42 allocs/op BenchmarkEncoder_Generic_JsonIter-16 10000 50275 ns/op 259.27 MB/s 13432 B/op 77 allocs/op BenchmarkEncoder_Generic_StdLib-16 10000 154901 ns/op 84.15 MB/s 48173 B/op 827 allocs/op BenchmarkEncoder_Binding_Sonic-16 10000 7373 ns/op 1768.04 MB/s 13861 B/op 4 allocs/op BenchmarkEncoder_Binding_JsonIter-16 10000 23223 ns/op 561.31 MB/s 9489 B/op 2 allocs/op BenchmarkEncoder_Binding_StdLib-16 10000 19512 ns/op 668.07 MB/s 9477 B/op 1 allocs/op ``` More detail see [ast/search_test.go](https://github.com/bytedance/sonic/blob/main/ast/search_test.go), [decoder/decoder_test.go](https://github.com/bytedance/sonic/blob/main/decoder/decoder_test.go), [encoder/encoder_test.go](https://github.com/bytedance/sonic/blob/main/encoder/encoder_test.go), ## Usage ### Marshal/Unmarshal The behaviors are mostly consistent with encoding/json, except some uncommon escaping and key sorting (see [issue4](https://github.com/bytedance/sonic/issues/4)) ```go import "github.com/bytedance/sonic" // Marshal output, err := sonic.Marshal(&data) // Unmarshal err := sonic.Unmarshal(input, &data) ``` ### Get Search partial json by given pathes, which must be non-negative integer or string or nil ```go import "github.com/bytedance/sonic" input := []byte(`{"key1":[{},{"key2":{"key3":[1,2,3]}}]}`) // no path, returns entire json root, err := sonic.Get(input) raw := root.Raw() // == string(input) // multiple pathes root, err := sonic.Get(input, "key1", 1, "key2") sub := root.Get("key3").Index(2).Int64() // == 3 ``` Returned ast.Node supports： - secondary search: `Get()`, `Index()`, `GetByPath()` - type assignment: `Int64()`, `Float64()`, `String()`, `Number()`, `Bool()`, `Map()`, `Array()` - children traversal: `Values()`, `Properties()` - supplement: `Set()`, `SetByIndex()`, `Add()`, `Cap()`, `Len()` ### Use Number/Use Int64 ```go import "github.com/bytedance/sonic/decoder" input := `1` var data interface{} // default float64 dc := decoder.NewDecoder(input) dc.Decode(&data) // data == float64(1) // use json.Number dc = decoder.NewDecoder(input) dc.UseNumber() dc.Decode(&data) // data == json.Number("1") // use int64 dc = decoder.NewDecoder(input) dc.UseInt64() dc.Decode(&data) // data == int64(1) root, err := sonic.GetFromString(input) // Get json.Number jn := root.Number() jm := root.InterfaceUseNumber().(json.Number) // jn == jm // Get float64 fn := root.Float64() fm := root.Interface().(float64) // jn == jm ``` ## Tips ### Pretouch Since Sonic uses JIT(just-in-time) compiling for decoder/encoder, huge schema may cause request-timeout. For better stability, we suggest to use `Pretouch()` for more-than-10000-field schema(struct) before `Marshal()/Unmarshal()`. ```go import ( "reflect" "github.com/bytedance/sonic" ) func init() { var v HugeStruct err := sonic.Pretouch(reflect.TypeOf(v)) } ``` ### Pass string or []byte? For alignment to encoding/json, we provide API to pass `[]byte` as arguement, but the string-to-bytes copy is conducted at the same time considering safety, which may lose performance when origin json is huge. Therefore, you can use `UnmarshalString`, `GetFromString` to pass string, as long as your origin data is string or **nocopy-cast** is safe for your []byte. ### Avoid repeating work `Get()` overlapping pathes from the same root may cause repeating parsing. Instead of using `Get()` several times, you can use parser and searcher together like this: ```go import "github.com/bytedance/sonic" root, err := sonic.GetByString(_TwitterJson, "statuses", 3, "user") a = root.GetByPath( "entities","description") b = root.GetByPath( "entities","url") c = root.GetByPath( "created_at") ``` No need to worry about the overlaping or overparsing of a, b and c, because the inner parser of their root is lazy-loaded. ### Better performance for generic deserializing In most cases of fully-load generic json, `Unmarshal()` performs better than `ast.Loads()`. But if you only want to search a partial json and convert it into `interface{}` (or `map[string]interface{}`, `[]interface{}`), we advise you to combine `Get()` and `Unmarshal()`: ```go import "github.com/bytedance/sonic" node, err := sonic.GetByString(_TwitterJson, "statuses", 3, "user") var user interface{} err = sonic.UnmarshalString(node.Raw(), &user) ```