Overview

Boost.JSON is a portable C++ library which provides containers and algorithms that implement JavaScript Object Notation, or simply "JSON", a lightweight data-interchange format. This format is easy for humans to read and write, and easy for machines to parse and generate. It is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language (Standard ECMA-262). JSON is a text format that is language-independent but uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others. These properties make JSON an ideal data-interchange language.

This library focuses on a common and popular use-case: parsing and serializing to and from a container called value which holds JSON types. Any value which you build can be serialized and then deserialized, guaranteeing that the result will be equal to the original value. Whatever JSON output you produce with this library will be readable by most common JSON implementations in any language.

The value container is designed to be well suited as a vocabulary type appropriate for use in public interfaces and libraries, allowing them to be composed. The library restricts the representable data types to the ranges which are almost universally accepted by most JSON implementations, especially JavaScript. The parser and serializer are both highly performant, meeting or exceeding the benchmark performance of the best comparable libraries. Allocators are very well supported. Code which uses these types will be easy to understand, flexible, and performant.

Boost.JSON offers these features:

Fast compilation
Require only C++11
Fast streaming parser and serializer
Constant-time key lookup for objects
Options to allow non-standard JSON
Easy and safe modern API with allocator support
Optional header-only, without linking to a library

Requirements

Requires only C++11
Link to a built static or dynamic Boost library, or use header-only (see below)
Supports -fno-exceptions, detected automatically

The library relies heavily on these well known C++ types in its interfaces (henceforth termed standard types):

Header-Only

To use as header-only; that is, to eliminate the requirement to link a program to a static or dynamic Boost.JSON library, simply place the following line in exactly one new or existing source file in your project.

#include <boost/json/src.hpp>

Embedded

Boost.JSON works great on embedded devices. The library uses local stack buffers to increase the performance of some operations. On Intel platforms these buffers are large (4KB), while on non-Intel platforms they are small (256 bytes). To adjust the size of the stack buffers for embedded applications define this macro when building the library or including the function definitions:

#define BOOST_JSON_STACK_BUFFER_SIZE 1024
#include <boost/json/src.hpp>

Supported Compilers

Boost.JSON has been tested with the following compilers:

clang: 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
gcc: 4.8, 4.9, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
msvc: 14.0, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3

Quality Assurance

The development infrastructure for the library includes these per-commit analyses:

Coverage reports
Benchmark performance comparisons
Compilation and tests on Drone.io, Azure Pipelines, Appveyor
Fuzzing using clang-llvm and machine learning

Security Review (Bishop Fox)

As part of our commitment to producing the very finest C++ libraries that application developers can trust, the C++ Alliance has commissioned Bishop Fox to perform a security audit of the Boost.JSON library. The report is linked here:

C Plus Plus Alliance - Boost JSON Security Assessment 2020 - Assessment Report - 20210317

Credits

This library wouldn't be where it is today without the help of Peter Dimov for design advice and optimization assistance.