Erlang JSON libraries: serialization performance?

Question

There are a number of JSON libraries available for Erlang, and it\'s not clear to me which have the best performance characteristics (and, secondarily, ease of use), especially

Answer 1

Hopefully this answer won't be ill-received, however:

I too looked into JSON parsing and serialization for a project. I had to process a lot of data in parallel, so Erlang sounded great! But a lot of that was dealing strings in the form of JSON data, and that's where things went sour.

As you probably know strings in Erlang are full fledged lists of characters. Unlike strings in most languages (a char is "about" a byte), each character in Erlang is represented by a whole 32-bit integer! So, already your strings are quite large.

Because it's a list, access to a given element of the string is O(N) instead of O(1) as you'd expected in an array of Chars. And, because strings are immutable in Erlang simple concatenation can end up being a very slow process. In the end I realized I was simply trying to use the wrong language.

In all likelihood you already know all of these things, but I felt it was useful to leave this as an answer for others who may at arrive at your post in the future.