megajson

owever, note that Go 1.3 will include a reasonably large optimization which introduces a "one-pass" NFA simulation. It's used when it can be proven that the regex will never need to backtrack. Rob Pike posted some benchmarks on golang-dev a while back, and they showed a perf improvement in the regexp package. So they at least seem to be working on things that you care about.) Speaking from a higher level, I'd say that the raw performance of regexes is probably not a huge priority. Needing wickedly fast regexes seems like a special case to me, in which case, you might just use an existing library to do it via cgo. (And indeed, the benchmark's game includes some Go benchmarks that use the PCRE C library, which has more reasonable performance.) For more details on how it all works, Russ has written an amazing series of articles on the topic: http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/ > Why does encoding/json still rely on reflection, making it slow compared to other approaches? Using reflection makes encoding/decoding JSON extraordinarily convenient. I do the same with TOML[1], although admittedly, performance is less of an issue there. My suspicion is that the added complexity for when you need raw speed isn't common enough to be in the standard library. megajson[2] tries to fill this hole, but it's a code generation tool, so you may find that less than ideal. [1] - https://github.com/BurntSushi/toml [2] - https://github.com/benbjohnson/megajson