Denotational Semantics and a Fast Interpreter for jq

02/21/2023

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by   Michael Färber, et al.

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jq is a widely used tool that provides a programming language to manipulate JSON data. However, its semantics are currently only specified by its implementation, making it difficult to reason about its behaviour. To this end, I provide a syntax and denotational semantics for a subset of the jq language. In particular, the semantics provide a new way to interpret updates. I implement an extended version of the semantics in a novel interpreter for the jq language called jaq. Although jaq uses a significantly simpler approach to execute jq programs than jq, jaq is faster than jq on ten out of thirteen benchmarks.