Against better judgement, I spent the past week writing my own JSON encoder and decoder for Perl. :blobshrug:
I'm happy with the result though. It's 3x smaller than JSON::XS, 7x smaller than Cpanel::JSON::XS, yet it has all the features I need and compares favorable in terms of performance, too. Was a good opportunity to learn more about perl internals as well. :blobcatjustright: