CON

Cretin Object Notation - a simple, fast and readable JSON-compatible serialization format

The specifications is mostly stable, but can be subject to minor changes.

Example

key "string"
pi 3.14
hash {
  enable true
  nothing nil
}
ports [
  22
  1234
  8888
]

Features

Backward compatible with JSON
Easy to read, fast to parse
Simple specifications

Documentation

https://j8r.github.io/con

Specifications

Specification document: SPEC.md

Usage

Add the dependency to your shard.yml:

dependencies:
  con:
    github: j8r/con

This object is a convenient container.

A CON::Any can be converted back to either a CON or JSON serialized String

require "con"

con_any = CON.parse con_data
con_any.to_con

require "json"
con_any.to_json

CON::PullParser can be used to parse more efficiently, if the mapping is known in advance.

See spec for more test examples.

Benchmarks

There are benchmarks comparing CON and the stdlib's JSON implementation

crystal run --release benchmark/*

Some results:

 CON.parse minified 527.25k (  1.90µs) (±13.77%)  1.88kB/op        fastest
   CON.parse pretty 501.42k (  1.99µs) (±15.08%)  1.88kB/op   1.05× slower
JSON.parse minified 487.52k (  2.05µs) (± 9.05%)  2.08kB/op   1.08× slower
  JSON.parse pretty 409.80k (  2.44µs) (± 9.13%)  2.08kB/op   1.29× slower

        #to_con   1.17M (852.99ns) (± 3.51%)  320B/op        fastest
 #to_pretty_con   1.10M (908.96ns) (± 5.76%)  320B/op   1.07× slower
       #to_json 742.97k (  1.35µs) (±14.52%)  576B/op   1.58× slower
#to_pretty_json 612.21k (  1.63µs) (±13.04%)  848B/op   1.91× slower