HackerTube.dev

Parsing JSON Really Quickly: Lessons Learned

InfoQ · 85.7K views · 2020-01-15 · 47:52

Open on YouTube ↗

If playback is restricted in your region, try opening the original video. Use Mark watched to add it to your marked videos.

Overview

Daniel Lemire's QCon talk on how simdjson parses gigabytes of JSON per second. It covers SIMD vectorization, branch prediction and the lessons learned building a fast parser.

On Hacker News

HN points to it as the best explanation of simdjson internals and of why fast parsing is rarely disk-bound.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2020–2026

Topics

Search by tags

What people said

D4ckard · 2024-01 · Recommendation

Daniel Lemire has an interesting talk on this: [VIDEO] . They key takeaway is that the disk is rarely the bottleneck.

Read the original HN comment ↗
Rendello · 2021-10 · Recommendation

I find these optimizations fascinating. Anyone familiar with Lemire likely knows about this, but I listened to a podcast episode[1] with him a few days ago and learned about `simdjson`, the tool he authored that parses JSON at 25x the speed of the standard C++ library.[2][3] It's worth looking at if you're into this sort of thing. 1. [LINK] 2. [VIDEO] 3. [LINK]

Read the original HN comment ↗
dehesa · 2020-05 · Recommendation

I can relate. I have been one of those who started writing a CSV library and went down the rabbit hole of edge cases and configurability. Looking back (and only thinking on productivity) my time would have been better spent doing something else. I did, however, learn quite a lot along the way: - how text is represented in a computer (and all its caveats), - how to identify and tune slow code, - how to vectorize code (thanks to Daniel Lemire's [VIDEO] ), - how to encapsulate code better, - how to use some great CSV tools out there (thanks to Leon's [LINK] ) - how to better manage and communicate an open source project. All in all, I am still not sure it was a mistake. Moreover when Swift didn't really had, at the time, a good Codable interface to CSV. Next time I encounter a similar problem I will probably just wrap a C library and create a good interface, though. In any case, if you are coding in Swift and find yourself in need of a CSV encoder/decoder, you might want to check [LINK]

Read the original HN comment ↗

Sources

Video by InfoQ, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

Views, duration and playback status refresh separately from the published catalog. When an update fails, existing data remains visible.

Selection checks
  • SaaS & AI candidates: Topic keywords do not match
  • Editor-approved picks: Editorial review is required

Rule matches identify candidates. They do not guarantee video quality or financial results.

About the library and its sources