It’s been a few weeks since I last wrote about the aeson library for working with JSON in Haskell, but this isn’t because I’ve been idle. In fact, just tonight I put out a new release. Where the previous releases focused on parsing performance, this one focuses on encoding performance.
And the performance news is good: on real-world data, I’ve improved encoding performance by about a factor of 4. Why don’t we let the graphs do the talking.
Enjoy!
Thanks for the amazing work.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a bug in the new version. If I enter “encode $ Number 200″ the result is “0D”, where the old version correctly returned “200″.
Holger, oops! You’re right. I swapped a “quot” and a “rem” by accident. I’ve released 0.3.2.1 and added a QuickCheck test suite, so this shouldn’t happen again
Thats a very nice improvement. As you’re using the blaze-builder library, I had a go at converting your string encoding to use the ‘Write’ construction:
https://github.com/meiersi/aeson/commit/328777ef0ad1e1e9d7a730bd16753384db5f5ec0
Together with a function for efficiently serializing Text values using the internals of your Fusion framework, which I just exported in a local dev version
https://github.com/meiersi/aeson/commit/1bcd9f7605cf61abe2faf7ff53b1f8aa91fd3f48
this results in another 50% speedup on your newly released aeson-0.3.2.0 library:
https://gist.github.com/881389
The current code is not as nice as it could be, as it defines functions that were better provided by the ‘text’ or ‘blaze-builder’ libraries. Especially, for the second patch, I’m not sure, if it should be included in aeson right now. The integration of the ‘blaze-builder’ work into ‘bytestring’ will solve these issues. However, progress is steady but not all too fast on that side.
Simon, those performance improvements look great!
I think that the fromWriteText function would be best in blaze-builder, as I can’t add it to text due to the dependency it would add on a non-platform library.
Let me know when you release a new blaze-builder with that addition, as the added performance would be fabulous to have. What version of GHC are you benchmarking with, by the way?
Hi Bryan,
I’m benchmarking on a Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz using GHC 7.0.2.
The problem with the ‘fromWriteText’ function is that it depends on the hidden ‘Text.Fusion’ module. Hence, I first need an updated version of the ‘text’ library. Once, you expose this module, I’ll add it to blaze-builder.
The ‘hex’ functions will have to wait with respect to blaze-builder. The plan is to incorporate them only in the new ‘bytestring’ library. Otherwise, my forces are getting spread too thin.
BTW: Could you send me a mail when you respond? I was hoping your blogging system would do that automatically, but it is not.