On: What Blocks Ruby and Python from Getting to JavaScript V8 Speed?

[coldtea]

>An afternoon to write, and then a year or more to work out all the bugs & corner-cases, write the documentation, and convince everyone to switch.

For a JSON parser? I think you overestimate the difficulty in implementing one. If anything, a parser for such a format is one of the easiest things to know you got correct -- there are extensive test suites.

As for switching to it, Python users already use several JSON libs anyway, so it's not like adopting another would be any great deal.

For the other libs, like numpy etc, yes, it would be more effort, but nothing unsurmountable. And speed is a far greater hook to get users to adopt that version of Python than "we now got unicode all over and fixed a couple more annoyances".

[RubyPinch → coldtea]

> so it's not like adopting another would be any great deal.

Isn't there a pure-python json parser in the standard lib already?

[unimpressive → RubyPinch]

I don't know if it's pure python but.

  import json

Does in fact give you a working JSON parser. I wasn't aware there was a different one to use.

[masklinn → unimpressive]

There's quite a few json parsers for python:

* the standard library's json, which stems from a merge of simplejson way back

* simplejson

* ujson which can be much faster but is not exactly sound[0]

* cjson

* jsonlib

* demjson

* pyyaml (since yaml is a json superset)

[0] http://mod16.org/hurfdurf/?p=266