Dmitry's Q4 2023 Update

By Dmitry Arkhipov on

Jan 12, 2024

In the fourth quarter of 2023 the functionality for direct parsing in JSON was finalised and the code was merged into the mainline and then released in Boost 1.84.0. Thus, I’ve moved to the natural opposite of direct parsing: direct serialisation. Boost.JSON’s serialisation is less customisable then parsing, since the demand for custom serialisation is significantly lower. As a result, the design of the serialiser is quite different from that of the parser, and hence a different approach had to be taken to implement direct serialisation. That approach, in my opinion, has a big benefit for the user: there’s no need for a dedicated direct serializer type, it can be done with the regular boost::json::serializer. On the other hand, it presents a different challenge: making changes to serializer in a way that does not negatively affect its performance too much.

This fight for performance has occupied most of my time in the last quarter. And it also provided me an opportunity to experiment with different potential optimisations to the serializer. I would also like to comment that different C++ implementations sometimes have directly opposite view on what’s better or worse for performance, which poses quite a conundrum in such line of work. And finally, this work was greatly influenced by the availability of continous integration infrastructure set up by the C++ Alliance, and automatic benchmarking in particular.

Another positive effect of C++ Alliance’s CI is due to coverage reporting. As I was striving to never decrease the rate of code coverage, I’ve discovered code in the serializer that used to perform a function, but have since become unnecessary due to refactoring.

Overall the work on serializer has vastly increased my understanding on how JSON’s serializer works under the hood. I plan to finish the feature of direct serialization before the next Boost release.