Unless you have fixed field lengths, you're still doing twice the work either scanning or resizing the buffer (or over-allocating memory I guess). That said, J

Unless you have fixed field lengths, you're still doing twice the work either scanning or resizing the buffer (or over-allocating memory I guess). That said, JSON is designed for human readability above performance, so it's a design concession that makes sense. What doesn't make sense is using JSON anywhere performance matters.