RX – a new random-access JSON alternative

Re:RX – a new random-access JSON alternative by gritzko on Thursday March 19, 2026 @06:47AM (#47437293)

I recently created my own low-overhead binary JSON cause I did not like Mongo's BSON (too hacky, not mergeable). It took me half a day maybe, including the spec, thanks Claude. First, implemented the critical feature I actually need, then made all the other decisions in the least-surprising way.

At this point, probably, we have to think how to classify all the "JSON alternatives" cause it gets difficult to remember them all.

Is RX a subset, a superset or bijective to JSON?

https://github.com/gritzko/librdx/tree/master/json

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Re:RX – a new random-access JSON alternative by SV_BubbleTime on Thursday March 19, 2026 @10:50AM (#47440495)

You went from BSON to your own and skipped CBOR and Protobuf? … I wonder if you would have made different decisions without Claude vibing you in a direction?

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Re:RX – a new random-access JSON alternative by creationix on Thursday March 19, 2026 @01:49PM (#47443203)

The current format version is the exact same feature set as JSON. I even encode numbers as arbitrary precision decimals (which JSON also does). This is quite different from CBOR which stores floats in binary as powers of 2.

I could technically add binary to the format, but then it would lose the nice copy-paste property. But with the byte-aware length prefixes, it would just work otherwise.

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