Update simplejson to 1.8.1 for better Unicode support

[John Millikin]

Simplejson 1.8.1 features greatly improved Unicode support and performance over the version included in Django trunk. In particular, the version in trunk mangles astral unicode when serializing.

If it's not feasible to include the most recent version, I would be willing to backport as much as I could to Django's version if that would be preferable.

[mattimustang@…]

+1
Except to say that simplejson 1.9.1 is out now.
I'm seeing very poor performance in simplejson 1.5 in Django when it comes to using it in serving RESTful JSON data from my models. Serializing anything more than a dozen objects with a few fields becomes noticeably slow to users. Being able to take advantage of the C "speedups" in the later versions of simplejson would be very beneficial.

Just how to include the module so that users can build the C extension themselves will be tricky.

Two alternatives would be to decouple simplejson from Django as requested in #4843 or change the simplejson import in django.core.serializers.json to be:

try:
    import simplejson
except ImportError:
    from django.utils import simplejson

Either way would allow users to build their own simplejson and use it.

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

Jacob and I had a chat about this and we'll do it at some point (moving to the latest version). What will be useful in the interim, however, is if somebody could work out what, if any, backwards incompatibilities there are between simplejson 1.5 and simplejson 1.9 that might affect Django's serialisers. Just drop a note in this ticket with any discoveries so that we can update the wiki page when we make the update.

[Matthew Flanagan <mattimustang@…>]

I've had a look through and I can't see any backward incompatibilities and I've dropped simplejson-1.9.2 in as a replacement for django.utils.simplejson in a large application that I have that uses serialization quite heavily and I haven't had any problems. All django tests pass too.

I'll attach a patch to simplejson-1.9.2 to bring it into Django.

We should also note in the serialization docs that you can build the C _speedups.so from the original simplejson source and copy it to django/utils/simplejson to get better serialization performance.

[Matthew Flanagan <mattimustang@…>]

patch simplejson-1.9.2 to turn it into django.utils.simplejson

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

(In [8124]) Fixed #7131 -- Updated included simplejson code to match the simplejson-1.9.2
release. This should be fully backwards-compatible for people using the public
interfaces.

[Jacob]

Milestone 1.0 beta deleted