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modulovalue • yesterday at 7:37 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

I'm working on better SIMD support in Dart and one of the motivations for that work is specializing parser specifications based on schema specifications of that language.

Or more concretely, if we had a parser generator + json parser specification that can generate efficient simdjson style parsers, then we should be able to parse json restricted to a subset of json based on a schema at least as efficiently as simdjson can parse general purpose json.

That way we could have the best of both worlds, a (potentially lazy) statically type-safe model and simdjson performance!

I still think that this is definitely doable, it's just that a lot of infrastructure needs to be built for it.

I remember reading that Meta is doing something similar with binary formats. I find it weird that there's nothing like that for json yet.


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weitendorf • yesterday at 8:05 PM

I was working on metaparsing earlier this year (specifically over grpc because of its better support for types and better serialization format).

I think most people who use JSON don't want strong typing or to use schemas. If you do, you just use a different serialization format: JSON is designed to be a generic, human-readable way to basically represent any kind of data structure (since it deserializes to JS objects). So everything about JSON is working against you if you do try to enforce type/schemas on it.

A grpc-like protocol with more prescriptive type registries/discovery (over the network) and better interop with http (like grpc-gateway) would be the best approach IMO. Definitely not JSON schema

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