Yes. The performance point boiled down to this: > These programs do not expect large amounts of memory and many are written with the intent that they may be us

Yes. The performance point boiled down to this: > These programs do not expect large amounts of memory and many are written with the intent that they may be used to process text line-by-line Which is only a problem if you are being very silly, don't choose NDJSON (newline-delimited JSON) and instead shove 10GB of data in a big [] array that the parser has to read in all at once. Almost every single JSON library can do NDJSON already. One of the most heavily used JSON-over-stdio applications is the Language Server Protocol, which uses JSON-RPC 2.0 and is entirely NDJSON. Same for about 15 different log-yeeting tools. Nobody has ever suggested switching LSP to plain text for performance reasons, only lower-overhead binary formats that don't throw out everything gained by having structure at all. Large memory use by JSON is not something inherent to the encoding that plain text is somehow immune to. All sorts of CLI programs read stdin in all at once, and you don't see plain text getting slammed for exorbitant memory use. In the context of the original post, `jc` etc, we're talking about essentially a constant sized output that's just much easier to parse, so the complaint is not relevant to those at all.