pico-json

Zero dependencies, small, fast, vanilla TypeScript object serializer with very compact binary format that is also quite compressible via lz4 and deflate.

Design goals

• Vanilla TypeScript (no native code)
• Zero dependencies (except Buffer polyfill, see below)
• Small (<300 LOC)
• Compact binary format (usually beats msgpack and others^[1])
• Fast encoding and decoding (competitive with msgpack and others^[1])

[1]: Benchmarks can be found here.

How to use it

Please note that pico-json uses Buffer under the hood. So, if you want to use it in a browser environment, please provide an appropriate polyfill.

The pico-json package just exports two functions:

function encode(obj: unknown): Buffer;
function decode(buf: Buffer): unknown;

To encode an object into a Buffer, do:

import { encode } from "pico-json";

const obj = { 'foo': 'bar' };
const buf = encode(obj);

To decode an object from a Buffer, do:

import { decode } from "pico-json";

const buf = ...;
const obj = decode(buf);

That's all.

Supported types

Pretty much everything you can encode with JSON.stringify should be encodable with pico-json.

In detail, the following types are supported by pico-json:

• boolean
• number (double and ints)
• string
• undefined
• null value
• Arrays of supported types
• Objects with string keys and values of supported types

Contribution

PRs welcome!