[johne]

A JSON parser at ~2K lines: https://github.com/johnezang/JSONKit I'm the author, so I'm obviously biased :). It has strict Unicode standard UTF-8 parsing ("passes" http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-test.txt) and has a whiz-bang LRU cache with a clever aging replacement policy that saves lots of time by reusing already seen and instantiated immutable objects (think JSON dictionaries: the keys in "key": value pairs tend to repeat an awful lot). A further benefit is this saves lots of memory too. For converting JSON to 'native' ObjC/Foundation objects, it's faster than the other ObjC JSON libraries by 2-10x (HEAVILY dependent on the JSON being parsed, typical is 2-4x), and serializing ObjC -> JSON is (usually) even faster.

So, in short, it's possible to write a very high performance JSON serializer and deserializer in ObjC in ~2K lines of code. For JSONKit, most it is actually pure C (which in turn uses Core Foundation, which is a pure C API interface version for the equivalent native ObjC objects), with public API ObjC stub bindings making use of the C code.