On a project I was working on (back in 2013), we noticed 30% of all our code execution was spent either serializing or deserializing JSON. Clearly there was room for improvement. The goal of Chason (pronounced 'chase on') is to see if I can catch and even beat the best of the best JSON serializers out there.
When I first developed this serializers were MUCH slower than they are today, having said that it's good to see my code still keeping up with some of the best of them.
- Prove the concept that JSON serializers could be faster! (see how fast .NET will let us go)
- Easily customizable type output with pluggable formatters (including support for your own value types converted to and from JSON)
- Full polymorphic support with internal type to external name mapping.
- Optimize for strongly typed data contracts with an explicitly specified member order (to improve perf even more)
- .NET Standard 2.1
- Feature parity with all other serializers.
- AOT support with code generators, there are better methods for that these days.
| Test | Iterations | Time (ms) | Objects / sec |
|---|---|---|---|
| SerializeChason | 1,000,000 | 948 | 1,054,526.4 |
| SerializeServiceStack | 1,000,000 | 2,864 | 349,117.8 |
| SerializeJsonNet | 1,000,000 | 3,292 | 303,759.8 |
| SerializeFastJson | 1,000,000 | 2,983 | 335,128.1 |
| SerializeDataContractJson | 1,000,000 | 1,694 | 590,081.8 |
| DeserializeChason | 1,000,000 | 1,886 | 530,207.5 |
| DeserializeServiceStack | 1,000,000 | 201,340 | 4,966.7 |
| DeserializeJsonNet | 1,000,000 | 1,710 | 584,574.8 |
| DeserializeFastJson | 1,000,000 | 1,631 | 613,094.7 |
| DeserializeDataContractJson | 1,000,000 | 5,332 | 187,531.7 |
- Tests are run with a thread-affinity set to a single core.
- Chason is unfinished and different test scenarios would probably fail.
- fastJSON serialization is quite fast in small iterations but became exponentially slow at 1,000,000 iterations so the iteration count was reduced to 10,000.
- Test is a single instance of a simple object being serialized / deserialized against common implementations
- Tests were run on a AMD Ryzen 9 5950x 16-core processor on Windows 11
Some of the code is based on a heavily modified version of fastJSON for deserialization.
- http://fastjson.codeplex.com/ - For fastJSON's code.
- http://www.codeproject.com/KB/IP/fastJSON.aspx - Article outlining how fastJSON works.
The license for this is MIT.
The chase is on!
Andrew Chisholm