40% faster JSON serialization with Source Generators in .NET 6

[@thehuggz-i9k]

I mean... when the IDE suggests Nick Cage, you use Nick Cage.

[@fakhrulhilal]

Please submit your name to MS, to see your name in suggestion list in the future 😆

[@kblyr]

Someone: How did you become better at software development? Me: I've been watching KZbin videos from Nick Cage

[@NotInventedHereShow]

Last time I looked at the STJ source generator it actually only generated custom serialization for serialization, not for deserialization, so that matches your results.

[@dominicc1804]

Nice! Do you know if this will be integrated into the automatic de/serialisation for web API? I'm sure there are opportunities to improve this so that we can associate the serialisation context with its respective class to eliminate the need to provide the type in every endpoint. I would assume it could be done with a tiny config in the startup/builder coupled with naming conventions.

[@dondumitru7093]

Excellent presentation in your video. Moved very quickly, and still easy to follow.

[@Gioandgoose]

Great work and great way to dumb it down for us! Thank you I am now a subscriber.

[@Gioandgoose]

By the way for context, I had a method taking 12-14 seconds, huge payload, down to 2 seconds so now to optimize the remaining code. Literally gona make me look so good at work lol

[@WhitbyStuff]

I recommend putting on captions with the mix of that accent and speed of talking.

[@mr_sweez]

Nice video! How does this work when serializing/deserializing dictionaries?

[@uccc2282]

Nice video as always... did u try with a very long json? I wonder if the benchmark improves with less reflection in a class with a lot of properties

[@flamendless]

Nice video! Im just curious, but why make another class (PersonJsonContext) instead of just using serialize, wouldn't that be more typing and more files to manage?

[@nickchapsas]

Because you have to in order for the source generator to kick in and generate the class needed

[@twiksify]

Source generators can only add, not modify existing code. Thus a partial class is required to hook in the auto generated code.

[@divinelemur9530]

I was gonna leave a like at the end of the video regardless but that Nick Cage autocomplete suggestion took me out. I left a like right then. Lmao!

[@JustinMinnaar]

I noticed on my own project that adding this immediately failed the project. The List that was serialized previously suddenly stopped working. I'll have to investigate later why.

[@sajagjain7169]

Can this be wired with dotnet core mvc AddJsonOptions?

[@rdwz9649]

This serializes at compile time, so I don't think this is an option for MVC or webapi.

[@Dokug]

Hi Nick, do you know how to get the source generated serializer to accept and work with double.NaN values? I have spent some time researching it but, at least for me, setting JsonNumberHandling.AllowNamedFloatingPointLiterals does not work with the source generated JSON context..

[@avocadopeel7536]

#1 thing i learned from this video: TOP LEVEL STATEMENTS OH MY GOD WHEN DID C# ADD THIS YEEEEEES

[@JensStragier]

Was added in C# 9 i believe!

[@MatthewHudson]

Can this be made into a more generic method - more classes can be added to the context, but what if we want to pass any object into this method, could it find the type and utilise the correct jsontypeinfo for serialisation , pass this data with it and use this for the deserialisation...?

[@binarybang]

How does this work for complex types? Would I have to write a JsonContext for every complex property of that Person class (say, an "Address" property) or is this handled automatically?

[@nickchapsas]

Yeah it will handle it

[@luls9000]

can i generate .cs source code files from json or would that be stupid? for example a dictionary containing json key and value pairs

[@walterhafner2910]

Hey im not so experienced in C# so sorry if it's a dumb question. but what is the best way of creating/ generating a Class from a given json ? are there source generators like this only for the opposite direction?

[@reikooters]

I know this is an older video and comment, but simply copy a sample json object to the clipboard, then open a new file in visual studio. Edit > Paste Special > Paste JSON as Classes. Sometimes you might need to modify the code that gets produced a bit (e.g. if it detects something as int but you know should be a long) but it will get you 95% of the way there. Properties that never have a value (always null) in your sample json it will use "object" as the type, so you'll need to fix those to the correct type.

[@BernhardHofmann]

Is this in a repo we can play with? I'd like to see how a `ToJson` method on the class would perform compared to the converters. For simple classes, and when you know the values won't contain JSON characters, it might be the fastest. Risky, but fast.

[@sps014]

Looks like in few upcoming .net releases we will reach Serde-Json level in terms of performance

[@lordicemaniac]

Interesting stuff as usually, love your videos. Btw, can you setup some converters or other things with this method like you normally do with attributes on properties?

[@KeondreLucas]

If there are multiple errors during serialization I want to return all of them to the client what's the best way to do this?

[@minihopp123]

I have looked at some of your videos, but what IDE are you using?

[@fyreek2569]

Jetbrains Rider

[@TheBadspeed]

Whats better? This or Newtonsoft deserialization/Serialization?

[@nickchapsas]

This is faster and more memory efficient but has less features. depends of how much of the advanced features of Newtonsoft you're using

[@Joxel]

Great video! Well explained and easy to follow.

[@tarasbuha7726]

Do you have any differences with Newtonsoft deserialisation?

[@nickchapsas]

Newtonsoft is just significantly slower than both approaches

[@realrs123]

Nice one! You should run benchmark only with release mode, could you try if you spot the difference?

[@nickchapsas]

It was in release mode. BenchmarkDotNet cannot run on Debug mode. All the benchmarks in all my videos are release mode.

[@jamesmelvin3071]

Till you make your class partial (We leverage builder patterns created with a source generate. Seems partial isn't supported yet.

[@zirkzirk1512]

Can I get this to work with serializing the response in asp net core api calls? I'm interested in optimizing that

[@cdarrigo]

I wonder if this can be used for more than just Json serialization. can we use these compile time source code generation for things like mapping? It would be great to replace the automapper functionality of runtime reflection with generated mapping code. I would be really interested to see how that performed against the way we handle mapping today

[@nickchapsas]

Ofc. I've already covered this topic in this channel in the source generators video

[@dondumitru7093]

Source generators are extremely powerful, but also somewhat involved to author. So if you have a strong custom use-case, you can invest the time and potentially get great or even results. But most developers will end up using source generators that are either provided out-of-box or from some other group of people who put the focus in to develop one for some specific use-case, because most developers are honestly not going to see the payback of investing in learning how to write source generators.

[@KunalMukherjee3701]

Writing the personjsoncontext class becomes redundant and verbose if we are serializing for multiple classes

[@nickchapsas]

A small price to pay for faster code

[@ShootyMcStabbington]

@@nickchapsas Not a bad idea for an IDE extension. A refactoring that can create the jsoncontext.{ext} file and class.

[@giboco]

I would like to move to this, however, the lack of the required attribute has been holding me back, does anyone know if this has this been addressed yet? Or is there an alternative way to do this?

[@normanbates9643]

I'm new to C#. What is the default! in the Person class doing?

[@GumbootMan]

"default" represents the default value, which for strings is "null". The exclamation mark (!) says ignore any nullability warnings. So "string = default!" is basically saying, give me a non-nullable string property, and assign null to it, but don't warn me about assigning null to a non-null variable. It's a quick and dirty way of suppressing nullability warnings while keeping some of the benefits.

[@misha130]

Why can't this be done with AOT instead? It seems odd to write JsonContext for each class that needs to be serialized

[@nickchapsas]

You don’t need a new context. Simply have one context and use multiple Types on it

[@dannygorrilla]

Would this work with the Refit library?

[@Miggleness]

i should update my json benchmark comparing bcl’s against the likes of utf8json and spanjson

[@nvnYT26]

can you please share the sample code used in the tutorial.

[@hiwiscifi997]

First of all: great video. *But* although it works just fine i do have a small issue in Visual Sudio when using this. It displays Errors since i didn't add a constructor etc. to the JsonContext class. It compiles just fine (The errors only show during editing...). Does anyone know how to suppress them? (Using VisualStudio Community 2022 with ReSharper) EDIT: The "partial" in the class declaration is also greyed out

[@Ajay-km8br]

Niceeee

[@Max_Jacoby]

Co-pilot must've been a second pilot in Con Air.

[@MalClarke]

Why would we want to do this? What am I missing?

[@theodorosdoukoulos9310]

wow wow wow

[@DarkF1nger]

I do not know C# is supported by copilot

[@vertxxyz]

I can't get this to work with my .net 6 project, and I'm wondering what I could be doing wrong. I save and I presume it's not running the generator. Is there a package or setting I might be missing (using Rider EAP 6)

[@sadasdasdsadas1]

have you figured out how to get over the error you had?

[@befkotze]

It is (1/0.62 - 1) = 61% faster. Really impressive! Thanks for sharing Nick.

[@igorproskochilo9805]

Wtf 🤯

[@mark7166]

Nope.... if it's 62% of the original execution time, it's 38% faster.

[@payamism]

Ok, but this was a linear serialization and deserialization. I am more interested to see how a complicated multi-nested JSON object is going to perform in your test.

[@nickchapsas]

The more complicated the usecase the faster the source gen will be

[@mac9219]

For me it doesn't give performance improvement. Also i have the question: how to use that in asp .net core api application?

[@nickchapsas]

You can use the context in the json setup of MVC, but you can only register one so you have to merge all your converters in one

[@owns3]

I don't like the content... I love it!

[@brunoccs]

"Hello everybody I'm nangandan..."

[@muhamedkarajic]

As always really informative. Wondering if that's possible for XML?

[@АйнурМингалиев-ы1з]

it's not works with Generic types(

[@mehmetck]

Still SpanJson faster then .net 6 Codegen version

[@Kokujou5]

yeiiii... so all we need to do is create an additional class for all the DTOs in our service that need serialization? well... thank ... you? i mean i think i'd rather wait the additional years until this code becomes default because i would rather not have dozens of garbage classes with no actual coding-purpose lying around in my code XD but maybe one can build those things with your solution in the swagger context. like iterate through all models in your swagger response/request documentation and generat a default serializer for all of them. however if you consider how fast Json serialization already is, the few miliseconds we save here are not really worth the effort. maybe it's worth a thought if you deal with megabytes of mass data. if you really want to speed controller responses up, then i'd suggest you take a look at returning iqueryable directly from your controller. if you now find a way on how i can actually catch serialization errors that happen while serializing an EFCore iqueryable, then you are king

[@Ris-v4w]

what if your person's name is Json ? 😶 doesn't the default way of serializing go 40% faster already?

[@aegis_helion]

Jil library still beats Microsoft heavily...

[@ahmetfatihsalim7616]

This video is like "How to draw owl: Step 1 : draw 2 circles, Step 2 : draw the rest of the fucking owl" meme type of video. Like, in order to understand whats happening, you need to have a bit of background. Otherwise you will just stare the 2 circles you draw which supposed to be a fucking owl.

[@jjxtra]

0.69 eh?...

[@oldfish3059]

my Patreon account has been disabled,Are there any other visits to get source code access?

[@jacobstamm]

Nick Cage lmao

[@mahesh_rcb]

Code writing code ...nioceee 😅

[@nested9301]

dude c sharp syntax is just way to hard

[@jackoberto01]

Compared to what other language? Imo it's one of the most readable languages and flows very well