You don't need to go straight to simdjson et al, something like Rust serde which desierializes to typed structs with data bllike strings borrowed from the input can be very fast.
Nobody is arguing that JSON is equally as performant as binary formats. What the others are saying is that the amount of JSON in your average lock file should be small enough that parsing it is negligible.
If you were dealing with a multi-gigabyte lock file then it would be a different matter but frankly I agree with their point that parsing a lock file which is only a few KB shouldn’t be a differentiator (and if it is, then the JSON parser is the issue, and fixing that should be the priority rather than changing to a binary format).
Moreover the earlier comment about lock files needing to be human readable is correct. Being able to read, diff and edit them is absolutely a feature worth preserving even if it costs you a fraction of a second in execution time.
> I agree with their point that parsing a lock file which is only a few KB
You mean a few MB? NPM projects typically have thousands of dependencies. A 10MB lock file wouldn't be atypical and parse time for a 10MB JSON file can absolutely be significant. Especially if you have to do it multiple times.
> Being able to read, diff and edit them is absolutely a feature worth preserving even if it costs you a fraction of a second in execution time.
You can read and edit a SQLite file way easier than a huge JSON file.
