# bytedance/sonic

A blazingly fast JSON serializing & deserializing library

Repository: https://github.com/bytedance/sonic
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/bytedance-sonic
Language: Go
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Topics: high-performance, json, jit, simd
Last push: 2026-08-26T15:35:59+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 99/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 99, release rhythm 99, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 1926, "days_push": 7, "days_rel": 7, "gap_med": 23, "n_releases_24m": 20}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 9589, forks 470 (observed 2026-08-28T04:10:35.951315+00:00)

## What it is
Sonic is a high-performance JSON serialization and deserialization library for Go, accelerated by JIT compilation and SIMD instructions. It provides runtime object binding without code generation and complete APIs for JSON value manipulation.

## Use cases
- serialize and deserialize json in go faster than encoding/json
- parse large json payloads with high throughput
- reduce allocations when marshaling go structs to json
- replace encoding/json in performance-critical api services
- manipulate json values without defining structs
- speed up json encoding in concurrent go applications

## When to choose
- your go application is json-bound and profiling shows encoding/json is a bottleneck
- you need to process large or deeply nested json documents at high throughput
- you want drop-in-style fast json handling without code generation steps
- you run on amd64 or arm64 linux, macos, or windows servers

## When to avoid
- you need maximum portability to architectures sonic does not support
- your json workloads are tiny and encoding/json performance is sufficient
- you are on an unsupported Go version (e.g., 1.24.0) and cannot adjust build flags
- you prefer a zero-assembly, pure-Go dependency for security or audit reasons

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: active
- function: serialization, parser
- domain: developer-tools, performance, apis
- platform: go, windows
- tags: json, jit, simd, high-performance, encoding, decoding, linux, macos

## Member repositories
- bytedance/sonic (main) score 99

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:10:35.951315+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T17:21:54.551102+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/bytedance/sonic (fetched 2026-08-28T04:10:35.951315+00:00, sha bbf77280db86)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.