Sonic

A blazingly fast JSON serializing & deserializing library, accelerated by JIT (just-in-time compiling) and SIMD (single-instruction-multiple-data).

WARNING: This is still in alpha stage, use with care !

Benchmarks

For all sizes of json and all cases of usage, Sonic performs best.

• Small (400B, 11 keys, 3 levels)
• Large (635KB, 10000+ key, 6 levels)
• Medium (13KB, 300+ key, 6 levels)

For a 13KB TwitterJson, Sonic is 1.6x faster than json-iterator in decoding, 2.7x faster in encoding，9.6x faster in searching.

goos: darwin
goarch: amd64
cpu: Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-9880H CPU @ 2.30GHz
BenchmarkEncoder_Generic_Sonic-16                         100000             27844 ns/op         468.14 MB/s       14332 B/op          4 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncoder_Generic_JsonIter-16                      100000             52179 ns/op         249.81 MB/s       13433 B/op         77 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncoder_Generic_GoJson-16                        100000             47033 ns/op         277.15 MB/s       13129 B/op         39 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncoder_Generic_StdLib-16                        100000            151394 ns/op          86.10 MB/s       48177 B/op        827 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncoder_Binding_Sonic-16                         100000              7338 ns/op        1776.47 MB/s       14492 B/op          4 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncoder_Binding_JsonIter-16                      100000             25365 ns/op         513.90 MB/s        9488 B/op          2 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncoder_Binding_GoJson-16                        100000             10357 ns/op        1258.62 MB/s        9483 B/op          1 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncoder_Binding_StdLib-16                        100000             20258 ns/op         643.44 MB/s        9480 B/op          1 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncoder_Parallel_Generic_Sonic-16                100000              5145 ns/op        2533.58 MB/s       10768 B/op          4 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncoder_Parallel_Generic_JsonIter-16             100000             11436 ns/op        1139.78 MB/s       13451 B/op         77 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncoder_Parallel_Generic_GoJson-16               100000             15274 ns/op         853.43 MB/s       13143 B/op         39 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncoder_Parallel_Generic_StdLib-16               100000             56236 ns/op         231.79 MB/s       48211 B/op        827 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncoder_Parallel_Binding_Sonic-16                100000              1821 ns/op        7159.40 MB/s       11262 B/op          4 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncoder_Parallel_Binding_JsonIter-16             100000              4559 ns/op        2859.24 MB/s        9487 B/op          2 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncoder_Parallel_Binding_GoJson-16               100000              2182 ns/op        5973.36 MB/s        9481 B/op          1 allocs/op
BenchmarkEncoder_Parallel_Binding_StdLib-16               100000              3867 ns/op        3370.58 MB/s        9477 B/op          1 allocs/op

BenchmarkDecoder_Generic_Sonic-16                         100000             61092 ns/op         213.37 MB/s       49761 B/op        317 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecoder_Generic_StdLib-16                        100000            158709 ns/op          82.13 MB/s       50899 B/op        772 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecoder_Generic_JsonIter-16                      100000            113397 ns/op         114.95 MB/s       55789 B/op       1068 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecoder_Generic_GoJson-16                        100000            108711 ns/op         119.91 MB/s       65679 B/op        944 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecoder_Binding_Sonic-16                         100000             32614 ns/op         399.67 MB/s       25174 B/op         38 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecoder_Binding_StdLib-16                        100000            150494 ns/op          86.61 MB/s       10560 B/op        207 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecoder_Binding_JsonIter-16                      100000             43621 ns/op         298.83 MB/s       14674 B/op        385 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecoder_Binding_GoJson-16                        100000             37525 ns/op         347.36 MB/s       22048 B/op         49 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecoder_Parallel_Generic_Sonic-16                100000             10581 ns/op        1231.89 MB/s       49636 B/op        317 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecoder_Parallel_Generic_StdLib-16               100000             67640 ns/op         192.71 MB/s       50909 B/op        772 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecoder_Parallel_Generic_JsonIter-16             100000             60982 ns/op         213.75 MB/s       55809 B/op       1068 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecoder_Parallel_Generic_GoJson-16               100000             51373 ns/op         253.73 MB/s       65718 B/op        945 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecoder_Parallel_Binding_Sonic-16                100000              6995 ns/op        1863.60 MB/s       24890 B/op         38 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecoder_Parallel_Binding_StdLib-16               100000             45269 ns/op         287.94 MB/s       10559 B/op        207 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecoder_Parallel_Binding_JsonIter-16             100000             18416 ns/op         707.82 MB/s       14677 B/op        385 allocs/op
BenchmarkDecoder_Parallel_Binding_GoJson-16               100000             17524 ns/op         743.85 MB/s       22132 B/op         49 allocs/op

BenchmarkSearchOne_Gjson-16                               100000              8812 ns/op        1477.89 MB/s           0 B/op          0 allocs/op
BenchmarkSearchOne_Jsoniter-16                            100000             55845 ns/op         233.20 MB/s       27936 B/op        647 allocs/op
BenchmarkSearchOne_Sonic-16                               100000             10422 ns/op        1249.54 MB/s           0 B/op          0 allocs/op
BenchmarkSearchOne_Parallel_Gjson-16                      100000               955.1 ns/op      13635.35 MB/s          0 B/op          0 allocs/op
BenchmarkSearchOne_Parallel_Jsoniter-16                   100000             18864 ns/op         690.37 MB/s       27942 B/op        647 allocs/op
BenchmarkSearchOne_Parallel_Sonic-16                      100000              1420 ns/op        9171.43 MB/s         234 B/op          0 allocs/op

More detail see decoder/decoder_test.go, encoder/encoder_test.go, ast/search_test.go, ast/parser_test.go

Requirement

• Go 1.15/1.16
• Linux/darwin OS
• Amd64 CPU with AVX/AVX2 instruction set

Usage

Marshal/Unmarshal

The behaviors are mostly consistent with encoding/json, except some uncommon escaping and key sorting (see issue4)

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

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

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().

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:

import "github.com/bytedance/sonic"

root, err := sonic.GetFromString(_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():

import "github.com/bytedance/sonic"

node, err := sonic.GetFromString(_TwitterJson, "statuses", 3, "user")
var user interface{}
err = sonic.UnmarshalString(node.Raw(), &user)