I think that in most cases jq is launched to extract value from relatively small JSON document, for which raw parsing speed is not affect much. jq is just really slow to start. Version 1.6 was especially abysmally slow to start, 10x times slower than 1.5:
So any replacement candidate should also benchmark like hyperfine "jq .a <<< '{"a": 10 }'" . This oneliner does not work but should illustrate the idea.
Also please just use jshon if you need to just extract specific value from some small JSON. jshon uses way less resources by any conceivable metric.
https://github.com/jqlang/jq/issues/1826
So any replacement candidate should also benchmark like hyperfine "jq .a <<< '{"a": 10 }'" . This oneliner does not work but should illustrate the idea.
Also please just use jshon if you need to just extract specific value from some small JSON. jshon uses way less resources by any conceivable metric.