[jose] Performance of Canonical JSON

[Anders Rundgren <[e-mail]>]

Since XML Canonicalization has a reputation of not only being brittle but also terribly slow, I tested JCS [1] with the following JSON file:
{
   "1": {"f": {"f": "hi","F": 5} ,"\n": 56.0},
   "10": { },
   "": "empty",
   "a": { },
   "111": [ {"e": "yes","E": "no" } ],
   "A": { }
}

Expected output: {"":"empty","1":{"\n":56,"f":{"F":5,"f":"hi"}},"10":{},"111":[{"E":"no","e":"yes"}],"A":{},"a":{}}

Since JCS only is a serialization concept (parsing is unaffected), I compared the execution speed of standard serialization versus canonicalized serialization.

Using https://www.npmjs.com/package/canonicalize the performance penalty was about 2.4 compared to JSON.stringify().
Using my homegrown JSON tools written in Java having an integrated "canonicalize" serializer option the performance penalty was about 1.4

Anders

1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-rundgren-json-canonicalization-scheme-01