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Transit, JSON & ClojureScript

26 July 2014

If you’re a ClojureScript user transit-cljs offers nearly all the benefits of EDN while delivering performance comparable to native JSON. And since the Transit JSON encoding is truly just JSON, transit-cljs also provides a better story when communicating with existing JSON services.

The Problem

ClojureScript launched more than 3 years ago with cljs.reader/read-string . This allowed Clojure and ClojureScript programs to comfortably communicate with each other. However, even after seeing several rounds of optimizations cljs.reader/read-string still delivers poor performance compared to JSON.parse.

Worse, most services speak JSON not EDN. You can JSON.parse and convert to ClojureScript data structures via cljs.core/js->clj but performance is even worse than cljs.reader/read-string.

transit-cljs addresses all of these issues at once.

JSON Reading

You can consume any existing JSON service in ClojureScript with transit-cljs and you will get ClojureScript data structures. The performance is 20-30X faster than combining JSON.parse with cljs.core/js->clj.

(def r (transit/reader :json))
(println (transit/read r "{\"foo\":\"bar\"}"))

The only caveat is that map keys will be strings - a small price to pay for the performance gain.

JSON Writing

You can send JSON to any service simply by using a verbose writer:

(def w (transit/writer :json-verbose))
(println (transit/write w {"foo" "bar"}))

Again your map keys must be strings but encoding is often more than a magnitude faster than cljs.core/pr-str.

Advantages over transit-js

transit-cljs offers benefits above and beyond those provided by transit-js. transit-js is consumed by JavaScript applications developers as a Google Closure Compiler advanced compiled artifact. But because Google Closure Compiler is already a part of the ClojureScript compilation pipeline, transit-cljs depends directly on the original unoptimized and unminified transit-js source code. This means far more of the transit-js implementation can be leveraged - for example transit-js 64 bit integers are goog.math.Long instances and you can treat them as such with no issues:

(ns transit-fun.core
  (:require [cognitect.transit :as t])
  (:import [goog.math Long]))

(def r (t/reader :json))
(.add (t/read r "{\"~#':\":\"~i9007199254740993\"\"}") (Long.fromInt 1))

Beyond JSON

Of course the most ideal scenario is to just expose your API optionally as a Transit service alongside the plain JSON service as this delivers the best read performance for clients.

If you are a ClojureScript user building an application that accepts or marshals either EDN or JSON I strongly recommend switching to transit-cljs for both tasks.