[erlang-questions] Why EEP-0018 "JSON bifs" (and conforming libraries) are "wrong" about object encoding (i.e. `[{}]`)

[Chris Pacejo]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 2:03 PM, Josh Adams <josh.rubyist@REDACTED> wrote:
> I would assume this isn't true until maps are fast with a large number of
> keys though...would that be accurate?  I definitely have plenty of json use
> cases that would likely perform poorly until that change occurs.

I would never expect the general case of accessing data stored in the
same logical structure it's transmitted on the wire in to be fast at
all.

Think about it: real-world large data is typically relationally rich.
Large datasets should be indexed in multiple ways to support efficient
access, and this indexing is by its very nature (a) domain-specific
and (b) informationally redundant.

But when sending this data on the wire, you want it to be *compact*,
not richly indexed.  So to support efficient access, you inevitably
need to restructure the data coming off the wire *anyway*.  (Not to
mention that not restructuring data couples both sides of your
implementation to the wire format and to each other, making it brittle
in the face of future changes.)