I'm targeting the boost JSON library for an embedded target.
There appears to be one place where there could be either a
beneficial new feature, or the feature exists and I'm not seeing
it.
The section about Avoiding Dynamic Allocation is close to what
we'd like to see, except that we don't want to depend on a stack
buffer for value data. All of the text of the JSON message is
present in the string view. It would be desirable to reference
the values from there.
When it comes to building a JSON library, there are many tradeoffs that must be made. Tailoring the library for one use-case necessarily inhibits other use cases or makes them less efficient. The design of Boost.JSON is based on offering an efficient and flexible "value type." That is, objects of type boost::json::value, which implement a form of variant across the seven JSON native types: null, bool, integer, floating point, string, array, and object.
What you are describing is a completely different JSON library. For example your model would be read-only, while instances of boost::json::value are also writeable. Implementing the feature you describe using Boost.JSON's existing types would be, to put it simply, a huge hack and incur enormous technical debt. It would be much cleaner to simply offer that as its own library. Or perhaps in another namespace under Boost.JSON, which reuses very little of the existing Boost.JSON code.
However, this effort is unnecessary because there is already a great library that does what you describe, and that is simdjson. Check it out:
Would this suit your needs?
Regards