The tradeoff would be different in an embedded context, for sure. I don't know that cJSON being worse due to not supporting allocators is "ironic," it's just th

The tradeoff would be different in an embedded context, for sure. I don't know that cJSON being worse due to not supporting allocators is "ironic," it's just the tradeoff there. Compile time actually really matters to my usage (changing gameplay code and seeing results immediately). nlohmann json was actually increasing my compile time by nontrivial amounts (like a 50-100% increase). Re: strong typed -- agreed. That's basically what I do with cJSON using a static reflection system in C++ (it recursively reads / writes structs and supports customization points). So it's kind of like using cJSON to give yourself a thin C++ layer. Agreed that a typed approach is more sensible than writing raw read / write code yourself (although that does make sense in some scenarios).