[falsedan]

I lost my mind at this sentence. If feels like a first-class data type because the result of parsing is one of the built-in data types (which can be round-tripped to a similar JSON string). And as soon as you care about serialisation of types it starts feeling incredibly clunky.

[Thorentis]

Yeah exactly. The equivalent would be to have a JSON parser in C++ which turns a JSON file/object into a C++ object that is accessed in similar ways to other typical C++ objects. So: {"key": value"} becomes json->key = "value" rather than json["key"]. In this library I feel as if they've used operator overloading to emulate the way JSON is used in other languages, rather than making the JSON feel like a first class C++ citizen so to speak.

[Merg]

I think as far as other languages are concerned, the best JSON handling gives youn Serde in Rust and F#, from what I read. If only C++ metaprogramming was easier without crazy complexity, Json library would be made to be much smaller and more efficient with less work.

[onei]

If you want to convert it to an object, have you tried using dataclasses? I haven't used them much, but last time I tried them they felt much easier than trying to use the native dict/list/str/int/etc. that gets returned by default.

[falsedan]

Yeah. It's the custom serialisation & schema/ctor arg validation that makes it clunky.