It takes a lot of complex code to optimize a JSON parser. You don't need to optimize that hard to make an equally performant parser for binary serialization for

It takes a lot of complex code to optimize a JSON parser. You don't need to optimize that hard to make an equally performant parser for binary serialization formats, and given SQLite's JSONB is purely an internal optimization, it doesn't have to be a well-known interchange format (which has much more concerns than SQLite). > Any time data is serialized, SOMEBODY is going to read it. With something as popular as sqlite, that's true 10x over. And this statement is equally true for the SQLite format itself. That doesn't mean that the SQLite format should be replaced with something more standard, of course.