On-demand JSON: A better way to parse documents?

Abstract

JSON is a popular standard for data interchange on the Internet. Ingesting JSON documents can be a performance bottleneck. A popular parsing strategy consists in converting the input text into a tree-based data structure—sometimes called a Document Object Model or DOM. We designed and implemented a novel JSON parsing interface—called On-Demand—that appears to the programmer like a conventional DOM-based approach. However, the underlying implementation is a pointer iterating through the content, only materializing the results (objects, arrays, strings, numbers) lazily. On recent commodity processors, an implementation of our approach provides superior performance in multiple benchmarks. To ensure reproducibility, our work is freely available as open source software. Several systems use On Demand: for example, Apache Doris, the Node.js JavaScript runtime, Milvus, and Velox.