A Faster Alternative to Jq

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Site & UX Issues

  • Multiple readers reported light-mode CSS bugs: white text on white background, unreadable links, overlays on code snippets.
  • Workarounds included toggling dark mode or using reader mode.
  • The author acknowledged neglecting light-mode testing and pushed fixes; some still saw issues initially.
  • Benchmark charts were criticized: inconsistent scales, unclear coloring, missing explicit jq baseline, and hard-to-scan labels.

Performance Claims & Real-World Use

  • Several commenters handle very large JSON/NDJSON (hundreds of MB to TBs) for logs, monitoring, ETL, and analytics; they care about 2–10× speedups in wall time and cloud cost.
  • Others said jq has never felt slow for their interactive use; for them, “faster jq” is mostly marketing or niche.
  • Some argued that performance at scale prevents tasks from becoming effectively impossible; even “one-off” jobs can be frequent in support/ops.
  • There’s debate on whether shelling out to a CLI is appropriate for high-throughput or low-latency paths.

Syntax, Semantics & Developer Experience

  • Many find jq’s syntax hard to remember, “arcane,” or conceptually slippery (especially around pipelines and arrays); they often rely on manuals or LLMs to write filters.
  • Others defend jq’s model as simple once you internalize its semantics and value its concision in one-liners.
  • jsongrep’s syntax is viewed by some as more intuitive for path-matching; others dislike it or want even simpler, JS- or Python-like query languages.

Positioning vs jq & Other Tools

  • jsongrep is framed as a faster, less-expressive, search-only subset tool (no transformations, arithmetic, or interpolation).
  • Some see this as useful as a pre-filter, but object to comparing it directly to full jq.
  • Alternatives raised: jaq (jq-compatible, Rust), jj, oj (JSONPath), rq (Rego-like), gron/fastgron, custom JS-based tools, DuckDB/ClickHouse/SQLite, nushell and PowerShell with native JSON objects.

Distribution & Tooling Ecosystem

  • Initial lack of arm64 macOS/Linux binaries drew criticism; others were content to install via Rust’s cargo.
  • The author later added arm64 releases and the tool was packaged for Homebrew and arkade.
  • One commenter dislikes “just install with cargo” due to toolchain bloat for small utilities.

Broader Optimization & Determinism Debate

  • Some view micro-benchmarks and ns/ms savings as performative; others argue cumulative CPU/energy savings and reliability improvements justify performance work.
  • Deterministic tools like jq are preferred over LLMs for actually running queries; LLMs are mainly used to generate jq expressions.