[vlovich123]

You're still describing a SAX parser (i.e. streaming). jq doesn't use a SAX parser because it's a multi-pass document editor at its core, hence why I said "jq-like" in terms of supporting a similar syntax for single-pass queries. If you used RapidJSON's SAX parser in the body of your custom code (returning false once you found what you're looking for), I'm pretty sure it would significantly outperform your custom hand-rolled code. Of course, your custom code is very small with no external dependencies and presumably fast enough, so tradeoffs.