Niels Lohmann 5bf19dc28d Bound the descent of dump() ...

Serializing a container serializes its elements, so dump() descended into one
call per nesting level. A value nested deeply enough exhausted the call stack
and terminated the process with a segmentation fault - no exception, nothing
the caller could catch. Parsing such a value works, as the parser is
iterative, and so does destroying one, as #1436 made destruction iterative.

Bound how far the descent goes rather than take the call stack away from it.
The first 128 levels are written by exactly the code that always wrote them,
and only below that does dump_iteratively write out what is left, keeping the
containers it has entered on an explicit stack. Serializing can therefore no
longer exhaust the stack, however deeply a value is nested, while a value
nested less deeply than the bound pays only for one comparison per container.

Writing every value that way instead measured between 2% and 20% slower - 20%
on object-heavy documents - which is why the descent is kept for all but the
values that cannot afford it. The bound costs nothing measurable: between
-1.4% and +1.2% across compact and pretty output of number, integer, string,
object-heavy, wide-object and deeply nested documents.

The output is unchanged for every value. Both ways of writing a container
emit the separator in front of every element but the first, rather than
after every element but the last, which puts exactly one between each pair
and none at the end.

This fixes #5387 for dump(). The copy constructor is fixed in #5389.

Signed-off-by: Niels Lohmann <mail@nlohmann.me>

2026-08-21 04:51:22 +02:00

..

nlohmann

Bound the descent of dump()

2026-08-21 04:51:22 +02:00