I did an experiment[1] last year that demonstrated JSON parsing only requires 1 bit on the stack per array or associative array encountered (as they are the two

I did an experiment[1] last year that demonstrated JSON parsing only requires 1 bit on the stack per array or associative array encountered (as they are the two non-terminals that lead to different rules). In my implementation, I let a 64-bit integer represent the non-terminal stack (then used recursion if it went over that). So you'd need a JSON structure that has "a hash of a hash of a hash ... pointing to an array" with a depth in the 60s before you'd get a recursion call. And the real program stack shouldn't take that much per call (I didn't optimize this part, so I'm not sure what the minimum is). I only wrote a JSON validator, but my method should apply to cases where JSON elements are being placed into a data structure. I'm pretty sure that a JSON parser could be written in C/C++ that requires less than 1kb overhead, where most of that is the string buffer. I make no claims about speed though, as my concern was proving the bit part (I suspect speed using my method would be worse than the naive per character jump table). [1] http://web.cs.dal.ca/~sjackson/bitJson/JSON.html http://web.cs.dal.ca/~sjackson/bitJson/JSON.html