zserge/jsmn

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

4175 stars · 814 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

jsmn is a minimalistic, header-only JSON parser/tokenizer written in C89 with no dependencies and no dynamic memory allocation. It produces tokens that point into the original JSON string, enabling zero-copy parsing in resource-constrained environments.

Use cases

• parse json in c without dynamic memory allocation
• embed a tiny json parser in a microcontroller project
• tokenize json strings with zero-copy semantics
• parse json on avr or arm with minimal footprint
• validate json structure in an embedded firmware
• add json parsing to a c89 codebase with no dependencies

When to choose

• you need an extremely small, dependency-free JSON parser in C
• your target is resource-limited or embedded and cannot afford heap allocation
• you want a simple tokenizer that points into the original buffer
• portability across x86, ARM, and AVR matters

When to avoid

• you need a full DOM with value extraction by key out of the box
• you require JSON validation with detailed error reporting
• you need support for very large or deeply nested documents without preallocating token arrays
• you want a parser in a higher-level language with richer APIs

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

parser serialization json parsers developer-tools embedded-systems c cpp embedded cross-platform header-only zero-copy no-heap-allocation tokenizer c89 single-header

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