"It works if you provide your own additional code that loops over and fixes known problems" is not the same as "it works". It's useful, but at most it saves yo

"It works if you provide your own additional code that loops over and fixes known problems" is not the same as "it works". It's useful, but at most it saves you a few lines of boilerplate code (and perhaps a few negligible cycles) to write your own recurser to do the same thing immediately after the transform. > Do you want JSON.stringify to keep dates intact ? The whole point is to turn it to a string. There are ways to serialize data structures to strings. JSON doesn't generally do that, and it's been to its benefit as it helps keep it generic and easily usable from many languages. That said, there are serialization tools which can correctly serialize and unserialize more complex structures, given the correct circumstances (only core constructs, or the objects in question have serialization helpers, or they are ensured to not have features that might cause problems such as references to outside data). The point of this discussion is Javascript object cloning, not turning objects into a string. Offering up JSON and then responding to a criticism of it based on its methods as "the whole point is to turn it into a string" is somewhat ridiculous given many of the other options you're espousing JSON over don't use strings at all.