Re:RX – a new random-access JSON alternative
by creationix on Thursday March 19, 2026 @09:53AM
(#47439482)
Thanks for testing it out! Yes, the website could use some love to make everything more discoverable.
The primary use case is not compression, it's just a nice side effect of the deduplication. This will never beat something like zstd, brotli, or even gzip.
My production use cases are unique in that I can't afford the CPU to decompress to JSON and then parse to native objects. But with this format, I can use the text as-is with zero preprocessing and as a bonus my datasets are 18x smaller.
The primary use case is not compression, it's just a nice side effect of the deduplication. This will never beat something like zstd, brotli, or even gzip.
My production use cases are unique in that I can't afford the CPU to decompress to JSON and then parse to native objects. But with this format, I can use the text as-is with zero preprocessing and as a bonus my datasets are 18x smaller.