System.Text.Json instead of Newtonsoft Json.NET?

[bill-poole]

It looks like a prior proposal to switch to System.Text.Json (STJ) from Newtonsoft Json.NET (#6070) was not accepted due to lack of support for polymorphism in STJ. However, it appears support has now been added for .NET 7. Should replacing Newtonsoft with STJ therefore be re-evaluated?

[ReubenBond]

Orleans uses its own serialization framework for serializing messages between hosts (for good reasons) but has support to delegate to other serialition libraries. For that, it supports System.Text.Json and Newtonsoft.Json already, and gives users full control over how they're configured.

The two libraries are far from parity and will not be at parity for the foreseeable future because they are targeted at different scenarios. STJ is much lower-level and much more explicit than Newtonsoft.Json at a cost of developer-friendliness.

For persistence providers (distinct from wire serialization), we support pluggable serialization, but we still need to implement that for the remaining providers: #7810

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[bill-poole]

Thanks @ReubenBond. Apologies I wasn't sufficiently specific - I was actually talking about persistence - specifically the DynamoDB provider. So if I understand you correctly, the position going forward for the DynamoDB persistence provider is to continue to use Newtonsoft as the default serializer, but allow a custom serializer to be configured, which would allow STJ to be used?

[ReubenBond]

The position is that storage providers shouldn't be responsible for serialization. Instead, they should delegate that to IGrainStorageSerializer, which can have various implementations (one per storage provider). If there's a default, Newtonsoft.Json certainly provides a better experience than System.Text.Json out of the box. Is there any particular reason you'd prefer System.Text.Json be the default?

[bill-poole]

I'm not particularly fussed about what the default storage serializer is as long as it is configurable. That being said, it would be nice to avoid unnecessarily packaging Newtonsoft Json.NET with my application. My primary concerns/interests wrt using STJ instead of Json.NET are:

• Performance: STJ is a much higher performance serializer than Json.NET and I have a very data-intensive application (that writes a lot of data to storage in very fast bursts) where every CPU cycle is precious.
• Consistency: I would like to avoid having some JSON serialized with STJ and the rest with Json.NET in my application because the two libraries can have different behaviours.