@lizzy@social.vlhl.dev @ada@zoner.work snac deals with a lot of JSON strings, all data is stored in JSON files on disk, sent as JSON over network, etc. Handling the data as loosely typed strings most of the time is likely cheaper than marshaling everything into well-typed "objects" and then serializing them back again on I/O. I haven't delved much into the implementation of xs myself, but I used it when I wrote a few patches for snac, and it was acceptable to use. I've been using snac for a few months, and it's much better on resources than any other major AP software I've seen, so I don't have complaints about the performance of parsing doubles :)

I still see snac as "worse-is-better" software, which I don't like much, but at least it's simple enough to start doing meaningful patches within a couple of hours of diving into it, and definitely cheaper for me than having to write a whole AP server from scratch, which I was tempted to do before.