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Scala json library choice

  • Status: accepted
  • Deciders:
    • Jonathan Winandy
    • Bastien Guihard
    • Dylan Do Amaral

Technical Story: We need to serialize and deserialize Notion domain class.

Context and Problem Statement​

What JSON library should we use ?

Decision Drivers​

  • Performance
  • Simplicity
  • Potential
  • Stability
  • Ecosystem
  • Capabilities

Considered Options​

Decision Outcome​

Chosen option: "Circe", because it is a library :

  • with a huge community
  • used massively for years
  • agnostic

Positive Consequences​

  • It answers all our problems
  • It is easy to write our own encoders using Magnolia

Negative Consequences​

  • The compile time for the auto derivation is huge due to Shapeless

Pros and Cons of the other Options​

Json4s​

/!\ We didn't test a lot this solution to be honest

  • Good, because it is a well maintained library with more than 1K stars
  • Good, because it is totally agnostic
  • Bad, because it lacks control over the generated json (specific decorator or configuration are missing)

ZIO Json​

  • Good, because it belongs to the zio ecosystem (and it is ZIO Notion after all)
  • Good, because it is the fastest solution (at compile time AND at run time)
  • Bad, because it is hard to write our own encoder due to the optimizations
  • Bad, because we can have a common configuration, and we have to add decorators everywhere
  • Bad, because it is still a young library
  • Bad, because we can't use it with generics (even if we don't need that YET)

Notes​

  • Due to performance, we may want to use ZIO Json in the future. However, at the moment, we think that it is not a priority.