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It's not about the format per se, but more about the fact that you're parsing an unknown/fully general structure in that format. APIs like Rust's serde can help to avoid excessive allocation when you have JSON in a known schema.

If a file is so large that the processor spends a lot of time parsing, then the file is too large to be conveniently edited by a person.

For large files it is best to use a binary format that can be read quickly without parsing or allocation. https://rkyv.org/ is an example.

Being 'friendly' is not why JSON is popular. JSON is popular because the decoder is included the web browser.

Thanks, and good point about dataset size.

I appreciate the thorough "shootout" benchmarks provided by the authors as well!

text isn't readable without software. why should we expect binary data formats to be?