PHP RFC: Replacing current json extension with jsond

• Version: 0.1
• Date: 2015-01-01
• Author: Jakub Zelenka, bukka@php.net
• Status: Under Discussion

The current Json Parser in the json extension does not have a free license which is a problem for many Linux distros. This has been referenced at Bug #63520.

The extension code is very old and without a maintainer which makes it difficult for further improvements. There also are some implementation decisions that makes the performance worse than it should be (see benchmarks).

The proposal is to replace the current json extension with code that is based on the PECL jsond extension (it's not exactly the same code as there are some modifications for PHP 7).

• Rejected ECMA-404 and RFC 7159 incompatible number formats in json_decode string
  • top level (PHP json_decode check): 07, 0xff, .1, -.1
  • all (JSON_Parser): [1.], [1.e1]

PHP 7

No impact

In addition to the backward incompatible changes for float number format the following internal changes have been done:

• removed JSON_parser.h header
• removed utf8_decode.h header
• macro JSON_PARSER_DEFAULT_DEPTH renamed to PHP_JSON_PARSER_DEFAULT_DEPTH
• error codes constants moved to php_json.h
  • enum error_codes renamed to php_json_error_codes (typedef)
  • ext global error_code type changed from int to php_json_error_codes

No impact

None

None

• Improving performance for encoder and decoder
• Better error reporting (location of the error)

50%+1 majority

The current patch for master can be seen at https://github.com/bukka/php-src/compare/jsond

The summary of the benchmarks is at https://github.com/bukka/php-jsond-bench/blob/master/reports/0001/summary.md. There also is a link for runs (measured data).

After the project is implemented, this section will contain

1. the version(s) it was merged to
2. a link to the git commit(s)

There is an old RFC for free json parser that proposed jsonc as a replacement for json. There were some concerns about the compatibility and performance https://www.mail-archive.com/internals@lists.php.net/msg66658.html .