There are third party bindings for nodejs https://github.com/luizperes/simdjson_nodejs. As you suspected, converting the entire document to a JS object is not recommended. [0] There is an additional API that allows you to query keys without conversion.
Yes, that is correct. I spent a lot of time on issue #5 to make as user-friendly as I could, but the only way I found to not have all the C++/JS conversion overhead was to keep the pointer to the external C++-parsed object. There might have other options that I haven't thought of, so if anyone knows of a better approach, let me know.