Django: introducing django-orjson

Just as cars painted red are known to be faster, libraries implemented in Rust are also known to be faster. Today’s example is orjson, a Rusty replacement for Python’s built-in json module, boasting 10x faster serialization and 2x faster deserialization.

Such a library is great, but adopting it isn’t easy, especially when your framework uses json in many different parts. To help Django developers adopt orjson, I have created django-orjson, which provides a whole bunch of drop-in replacements for Django and Django REST Framework (DRF) components backed by orjson.

For example, there’s a version of JsonResponse:

from django_orjson.http import JsonResponse


def index(request):
    return JsonResponse({"title": "Hello, world!"})

…a test client with matching test case classes:

from django_orjson.test import SimpleTestCase


class IndexTests(SimpleTestCase):
    def test_index(self):
        response = self.client.get("/", headers={"accept": "application/json"})
        assert response.status_code == 200
        # response.json() uses orjson to parse the response body
        assert response.json() == {"title": "Hello, world!"}

…a version of Django’s json_script template tag:

{% load django_orjson %}
{{ chart_data|json_script:"chart-data" }}

…and plenty more! All tested against the currently supported versions of Python and Django with 100% branch coverage.

While database queries tend to dominate the typical Django application’s runtime, the time spent in serialization and deserialization can still be significant. That can make adopting orjson a nearly free performance win, which I hope django-orjson makes almost trivial for you.

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Related posts:

• Django: introducing django-integrity-policy
• Django: Introducing django-http-compression

Tags: django