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> a redundant external dependency

Is pip install that hard? Surely any deployed project is already managing a requirements.txt/buildout/setup.py/etc.

> means you'll eventually get those improvements

The C speedup extension for simplejson existed well before it was merged into Python stdlib as "json". Are you so sure you'll eventually get said improvement?

> Sticking with the standard library means you'll eventually get those improvements, too.

Not in 2.x, you won't.

Best of both worlds would be to try to import simplejson, and if that fails, fall back to the standard library json. As they have the same interface, that's trivial to do.