[jkeiser]

What I've learned from this (as a simdjson author) is that we need to update the quick start in the README to have -O3. I was so psyched about the fact that we now compiled warning-free without any parameters ... that I didn't stop to think that some people would go "huh I did what they told me and simdjson is slow, wtf." Because we evidently told you to compile it in debug mode in the quick start :)

simdjson relies deeply on inlining to let us write performant code that is also readable.

Sorry to have sent you down a blind alley!

One thing to note: if you want to get good numbers to chew on, we have a bunch of really good real world examples, of ALL sizes (simdjson is about big and small), in the jsonexamples/ directory of simdjson. And if you want to check ojc's validation, there are a number of pass.json and fail.json files in the jsonchecker/ directory.