This is something I really don't like about Go.

80 lines of code to parse some JSON?

Meanwhile, in ruby...

  foo = JSON.parse(STDIN.read)

rudolf0

Not a very fair comparison due to Go's (mostly) static typing and Ruby's very dynamic typing.

In this case, the author wants to use a struct with custom user-defined types as members, while JSON only has concepts of primitive types. That's why you're going to need a lot more code than you would otherwise.

I agree there needs to be a better way to do it though. And "go generate" seems like the hackiest thing in the world for 95% of use cases, including this one.

chimeracoder

For what it's worth, you don't need to even need to type out the struct manually when unmarshalling JSON; you can generate it automatically[0] (this tool is compatible with `go generate`).

In addition to the effects of being statically typed, which you mentioned, Go is a bit lower level than Python or Ruby, so it will always perform at least slightly worse when compared on a strict line-by-line basis. Fortunately, though, it's not that much more verbose in this case. And as an added benefit, the struct value, once unmarshalled, is typesafe (which is not true in Python[1]).

[0] https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/gojson

[1] Because Python is not only dynamically typed but strongly typed, I've more than once run into an issue where a misbehaving API returns a string instead of an int, and then Python throws a runtime exception because it can't add a string and an int.