shorn vs JSON

JSON is the baseline most TypeScript projects are replacing.

Size

Fixture	shorn	JSON	Saving
Person	8	35	77%
Unicode person	31	58	47%
Nested event	43	163	74%
100 events	4,135	16,148	74%
100,000 events	4,231,777	16,340,686	74%

The Unicode row shows where the savings come from: shorn removes field names and syntax, not string content. Payloads dominated by structure and numbers can be about 75% smaller than JSON. Payloads dominated by free text see smaller gains.

Compressed, on 100,000 repetitive events:

	shorn	JSON	Saving
Gzip	924,494	1,474,952	38%
Brotli q6	603,189	985,919	39%

Repeated keys are what a compressor is good at, so compression narrows the gap without closing it.

Speed

The benchmark uses two JSON baselines.

JSON bytes encodes to and decodes from a Uint8Array. This is the direct comparison for binary transports. shorn wins every result:

Fixture	shorn enc	JSON enc	shorn dec	JSON dec
Person	25.16M	4.74M	67.55M	4.67M
Unicode person	7.74M	3.77M	7.68M	3.58M
Nested event	8.64M	1.40M	11.45M	1.74M
100-event batch	100.1k	36.3k	116.3k	21.2k
Person, validated	8.93M	3.69M	12.07M	3.54M

Decode is where the record decoder shows: for Person, shorn is 14.5× JSON bytes, and the margin holds at 6.6× for the nested event and 5.5× for the batch. The encode margins are now 5.3× on Person and 6.2× on the nested event.

JSON string stops at a JavaScript string and reaches 10.82M encodes/s for Person, against shorn’s 25.16M. It no longer beats shorn on any fixture in either direction. This baseline does less work because it never produces bytes, even though the size result reports UTF-8 byte length. Sending the string over a socket still requires that conversion.

Text output was measured and rejected

• base64: −31% throughput, +33% size.
• Latin-1 binary string: −25% throughput, and inflates on the wire, since every byte above 0x7F becomes two UTF-8 bytes when actually sent.

Neither format matches the JSON string result because that baseline skips byte conversion. Base64 may still make sense for text-only transports because it is about 3× smaller than JSON in this test, but it is not faster.

What JSON keeps

• Universal. Every language, every tool, no schema needed.
• Inspectable. curl | jq works; a shorn payload is opaque without its schema.
• No schema coupling. A JSON payload outlives any schema version; a shorn payload does not.
• Streaming. Incremental JSON parsers exist.
• Zero setup. 0.08 µs cold against shorn’s 52–66 µs.

When to switch

Switch when payload size is a real cost (metered egress, mobile clients, high-volume queues, edge-to-origin), you already validate with Zod, Valibot, or ArkType, and both ends are TypeScript.

Stay with JSON when you need cross-language readers, inspectable payloads, or streaming. JSON is also the simpler choice when payloads are too small or infrequent for the savings to matter.

Migrating

// Before
const body = JSON.stringify(person);
const parsed = Person.parse(JSON.parse(text));

// After
const body = encode(Person, person);
const parsed = decode(Person, body);

Handle two migration details. First, Date and bigint fields need an explicit wire representation; see rich types. Second, set Content-Type: application/octet-stream because shorn has no registered media type.