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These benchmarks compare…

  • Gson, Moshi, kotlinx serialization
  • Reflective vs streaming APIs (via code gen)
  • Moshi’s Kotlin support (reflective or code gen for streaming APIs)

Note Kotlinx serialization only works via the standard compiler plugin

“Minified” means the JSON was minified with whitespaces between keys and values removed. Note this is only relevant for deserialization.

AutoValue APIs are done via AutoValue models with the auto-value-gson/Moshi extensions, thus using generated adapters.

Kotlin codegen generates Kotlin JsonAdapters.

Reflection is done usually on a simple class due to limitations of instantiation. Moshi’s reflection library is the exception (it can handle data class types)

String serialization is a practical example, buffered input/output is likely more representative of how your stack works in terms of I/O

Latest results TL;DR

  • Fastest reader: Moshi
  • Fastest writer: Moshi

Speed is not everything though! Different libraries come with different trade offs. That said, these are benchmarks.

Project structure

  • :models - all the core models being benchmarked + json files (in resources)
  • :jmh - JMH benchmarks
  • :android:benchmark - Android benchmarks

For each of the JMH and Android benchmarks, there are two kinds of benchmarks:

  • A core “Benchmark” for pure speed comparisons
  • A polymorphic test. In the case of this project, these tests are purely comparing Moshi’s PolymorphicJsonAdapterFactory against Gson’s RuntimeTypeAdapterFactory.

Running locally

JMH tests

./gradlew jmh -Pjmh=<File name to Run>

Android tests

./gradlew :android:benchmark:connectedCheck

You can use respective *DataParser.kt files to parse the raw results (starting with the first benchmark line after the headers).