There’s a weird sort of apples to oranges comparison going on here. Having pointers to separately allocated strings gives you much more functionality than an un

There’s a weird sort of apples to oranges comparison going on here. Having pointers to separately allocated strings gives you much more functionality than an unindexed blob of JSON text. That obviously has a cost in terms of memory. But if you need to, you can represent the same data as a contiguous block of C-style formatted structures, in which case the “x” wouldn’t need more than two or three bytes depending on the representation you choose. In fact, there are formats designed for this exact purpose. The idea that JSON is somehow surprisingly efficient for what it does is just silly.