Add option to parse object keys as symbols

[mattdaw]

The app I work on has a heavily used JSON-based API and I'm pretty sure I'd get some efficiencies out of being able to get hashes straight from JSON.parse with symbolized keys... like:

{ :request_type => 'create', :entity_type => 'Ticket' ...etc }

If you could add that as an option, that'd be awesome...

[flori]

It's an interesting idea. Do you have to iterate over all the keys now, in order to symbolify the keys? Or why is it inefficient? Maybe you can try the new master branch's version of JSON as well: It's quite a bit faster than the 1.2.x versions.

[mattdaw]

My hypothesis is that there would be an efficiency in not creating short-lived string objects for the hash keys that the app receives repeatedly... as the symbols are shared objects. I've been playing with yajl-ruby which has a "symbolize_keys" option, but I haven't got useful benchmarks on the difference yet.

[flori]

I have implemented the :symbolize_names feature in the 1.2. branch: http://github.com/flori/json/tree/v1.2

Maybe you can check it out?

[mattdaw]

Great, thanks. I'll check it out.

[mattdaw]

Looks good, closing the ticket. Thanks again.