[latexr]

And that in turn affects tool adoption. I have dabbled in Lua for interacting with other software such as mpv, but never got much into the weeds with it because it lacks native JSON support, and I need to interact with JSON all the time.

[creationix]

yeah, LuaJIT is one of the use cases I had in mind working on this. JSON is pretty fast in modern JS engines, but in Lua land, JSON kinda sucks and doesn't really match the language without using virtual tables.

JSON has `null` values with string keyds, but lua doesn't have `null`. It has `nil`, but you can't have a key with a nil value. Setting nil deletes the key

Lua tables are unordered. But JS and JSON are often ordered and order often matters.

RX, however matches Lua/LuaJIT extremely well and should out-perform the JS Proxy based decoder using metatables. Since it's using metatables anyway do to the lazy parsing, it's trivial to do things like preserve order when calling `pairs` and `ipairs` and even including keys with associated null values.

You can round trip safely in Lua, which is not easy with most JSON implementations.