Re: [libvirt] Should we switch to a different JSON library?

On Tue, Nov 07, 2017 at 02:05:25PM +0100, Martin Kletzander wrote: > Hi everyone, > > so we are using yajl for parsing JSON. However there are some reasons > why we might consider switching to another one: > > 1) It is basically dead upstream One could say that it is simply "feature complete" upstream so doesn't need more work, but none the less, I have a general bad feeling about relying on a library with no active maint work going on for best part of 4 years, and 68 open pull requests. > 2) We're just using the lexer part of it > 3) We only use it for parsing Aren't 2 & 3 the same point repeated ? Regardless though, we use yajl for formatting JSON too (virJSONValueToString)

> 4) The are workarounds for it in the code I don't recall what these are now ? > So I looked at some options and found few other libraries, I only took > those that are widely available (read: I checked if some random > downstream distro has them), however most of them were not very much > usable. Except one. But here's the list of few others that didn't look > that bad either. All are MIT-licensed, try to be thread-safe and > support pkg-config: > > - libfastjson [1] - from rsyslog community, optimized for working with > logs, used almost only by rsyslog, it's supposed to > have doxygen docs, they switched to libfastjson > from json-c due to some problems with it > (performance, ref counting bug, ...) If its only used by 1 app, I would stay well clear of it, as that's just one step away from be unused and dead. > - json-c [2] - looked abandoned until I looked at the proper github > page, "documentation" in doxygen Yeah, this is the main one I know about and existed way back when I picked yajl originally. It has plenty of apps using it in Fedora, which is good. At first the header files look to have good namespacing, but then I see horrific things like this polluting the namespaces: #undef FALSE #define FALSE ((json_bool)0) #undef TRUE #define TRUE ((json_bool)1) #define hexdigit(x) (((x) <= '9') ? (x) - '0' : ((x) & 7) + 9) #define error_ptr(error) ((void*)error) #define error_description(error) (json_tokener_errors[error]) #define is_error(ptr) (ptr == NULL) > - Jansson [3] - I really like this one. The API seems very intuitive, > it has nice documentation [4] in readthedocs (and I'm > not talking about the visual style, but how easy is to > find information), it can be used for formatting JSON > in a similar way we are doing it. It has json_auto_t > (optional) type that uses the attribute cleanup for > automatic scope dereference (just in case we want to > use it), it has iterators... did I tell you I like this > one a lot? Like yajl did, they seem to have had an explicit ABI break at their 2.0 version, which was released in 2011. Not a big deal if we only support their 2.x series, especially if we keep yajl as an optional fallback It has 15 open PRs and 32 open bugs, but unlike yajl it actually has active development taking place Its header namespace looks clean too. > What do you (others) think of switching the JSON library? Do you know > about any other projects that could be used considering license, > platform support, etc.? Also feel free to fix any mistakes I might have > posted. I double-checked it, but you know, "trust, but verify". I'd be broadly in favour of switching to something that is not dead :-) I agree that Jansson appears the most promising. I think we would have to keep yajl support in parallel, but that's not too hard, since this is all isolated in virjson.c

Regards, Daniel -- |: https://berrange.com -o- https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :| |: https://libvirt.org -o- https://fstop138.berrange.com :| |: https://entangle-photo.org -o- https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :|