smol-toml

A small, fast, and correct TOML parser and serializer. smol-toml is fully(ish) spec-compliant with TOML v1.0.0.

Why yet another TOML parser? Well, the ecosystem of TOML parsers in JavaScript is quite underwhelming, most likely due to a lack of interest. With most parsers being outdated, unmaintained, non-compliant, or a combination of these, a new parser didn't feel too out of place.

[insert xkcd 927]

smol-toml passes most of the tests from the toml-test suite; use the run-toml-test.bash script to run the tests. Due to the nature of JavaScript and the limits of the language, it doesn't pass certain tests, namely:

• Invalid UTF-8 strings are not rejected
• Certain invalid UTF-8 codepoints are not rejected
• Certain invalid dates are not rejected
  • For instance, 2023-02-30 would be accepted and parsed as 2023-03-02. While additional checks could be performed to reject these, they've not been added for performance reasons.
• smol-toml doesn't preserve type information between integers and floats (in JS, everything is a float)

You can see a list of all tests smol-toml fails (and the reason why it fails these) in the list of skipped tests in run-toml-test.bash. Note that some failures are not specification violations per-se. For instance, the TOML spec does not require 64-bit integer range support or sub-millisecond time precision, but are included in the toml-test suite. See toml-lang/toml-test#154 and toml-lang/toml-test#155

Installation

[pnpm | yarn | npm] i smol-toml

Usage

import { parse, stringify } from 'smol-toml'

const doc = '...'
const parsed = parse(doc)
console.log(parsed)

const toml = stringify(parsed)
console.log(toml)

Alternatively, if you prefer something similar to the JSON global, you can import the library as follows

import TOML from 'smol-toml'

TOML.stringify({ ... })

A few notes on the stringify function:

• undefined and null values on objects are ignored (does not produce a key/value).
• undefined and null values in arrays are rejected.
• Functions, classes and symbols are rejected.
• floats will be serialized as integers if they don't have a decimal part.
  • stringify(parse('a = 1.0')) === 'a = 1'
• JS Date will be serialized as Offset Date Time
  • Use the TomlDate object for representing other types.

Dates

smol-toml uses an extended Date object to represent all types of TOML Dates. In the future, smol-toml will use objects from the Temporal proposal, but for now we're stuck with the legacy Date object.

import { TomlDate } from 'smol-toml'

// Offset Date Time
const date = new TomlDate('1979-05-27T07:32:00.000-08:00')
console.log(date.isDateTime(), date.isDate(), date.isTime(), date.isLocal()) // ~> true, false, false, false
console.log(date.toISOString()) // ~> 1979-05-27T07:32:00.000-08:00

// Local Date Time
const date = new TomlDate('1979-05-27T07:32:00.000')
console.log(date.isDateTime(), date.isDate(), date.isTime(), date.isLocal()) // ~> true, false, false, true
console.log(date.toISOString()) // ~> 1979-05-27T07:32:00.000

// Local Date
const date = new TomlDate('1979-05-27')
console.log(date.isDateTime(), date.isDate(), date.isTime(), date.isLocal()) // ~> false, true, false, true
console.log(date.toISOString()) // ~> 1979-05-27

// Local Time
const date = new TomlDate('07:32:00')
console.log(date.isDateTime(), date.isDate(), date.isTime(), date.isLocal()) // ~> false, false, true, true
console.log(date.toISOString()) // ~> 07:32:00.000

You can also wrap a native Date object and specify using different methods depending on the type of date you wish to represent:

import { TomlDate } from 'smol-toml'

const jsDate = new Date()

const offsetDateTime = TomlDate.wrapAsOffsetDateTime(jsDate)
const localDateTime = TomlDate.wrapAsLocalDateTime(jsDate)
const localDate = TomlDate.wrapAsLocalDate(jsDate)
const localTime = TomlDate.wrapAsLocalTime(jsDate)

Performance

A note on these performance numbers: in some highly synthetic tests, other parsers such as fast-toml greatly outperform other parsers, mostly due to their lack of compliance with the spec. For example, to parse a string, fast-toml skips the entire string while smol-toml does validate the string, costing a fair share of performance.

The ~5MB test file used for benchmark here is filled with random data which attempts to be close-ish to reality in terms of structure. The idea is to have a file relatively close to a real-world application, with moderately sized strings etc.

The large TOML generator can be found here

Parse	smol-toml	@iarna/[email protected]	@ltd/j-toml	fast-toml
Spec example	71,356.51 op/s	33,629.31 op/s	16,433.86 op/s	29,421.60 op/s
~5MB test file	3.8091 op/s	DNF	2.4369 op/s	2.6078 op/s

Stringify	smol-toml	@iarna/[email protected]	@ltd/j-toml
Spec example	195,191.99 op/s	46,583.07 op/s	5,670.12 op/s
~5MB test file	14.6709 op/s	3.5941 op/s	0.7856 op/s

Detailed benchmark data

Tests ran using Vitest v0.31.0 on commit f58cb6152e667e9cea09f31c93d90652e3b82bf5

CPU: Intel Core i7 7700K (4.2GHz)

 RUN  v0.31.0

 ✓ bench/parseSpecExample.bench.ts (4) 2462ms
     name                hz     min     max    mean     p75     p99    p995    p999     rme  samples
   · smol-toml    71,356.51  0.0132  0.2633  0.0140  0.0137  0.0219  0.0266  0.1135  ±0.37%    35679   fastest
   · @iarna/toml  33,629.31  0.0272  0.2629  0.0297  0.0287  0.0571  0.0650  0.1593  ±0.45%    16815
   · @ltd/j-toml  16,433.86  0.0523  1.3088  0.0608  0.0550  0.1140  0.1525  0.7348  ±1.47%     8217   slowest
   · fast-toml    29,421.60  0.0305  0.2995  0.0340  0.0312  0.0618  0.0640  0.1553  ±0.47%    14711
 ✓ bench/parseLargeMixed.bench.ts (3) 16062ms
     name             hz     min     max    mean     p75     p99    p995    p999     rme  samples
   · smol-toml    3.8091  239.60  287.30  262.53  274.17  287.30  287.30  287.30  ±3.66%       10   fastest
   · @ltd/j-toml  2.4369  376.73  493.49  410.35  442.58  493.49  493.49  493.49  ±7.08%       10   slowest
   · fast-toml    2.6078  373.88  412.79  383.47  388.62  412.79  412.79  412.79  ±2.72%       10
 ✓ bench/stringifySpecExample.bench.ts (3) 1886ms
     name                 hz     min     max    mean     p75     p99    p995    p999     rme  samples
   · smol-toml    195,191.99  0.0047  0.2704  0.0051  0.0050  0.0099  0.0110  0.0152  ±0.41%    97596   fastest
   · @iarna/toml   46,583.07  0.0197  0.2808  0.0215  0.0208  0.0448  0.0470  0.1704  ±0.47%    23292
   · @ltd/j-toml    5,670.12  0.1613  0.5768  0.1764  0.1726  0.3036  0.3129  0.4324  ±0.56%     2836   slowest
 ✓ bench/stringifyLargeMixed.bench.ts (3) 24057ms
     name              hz       min       max      mean       p75       p99      p995      p999     rme  samples
   · smol-toml    14.6709   65.1071   79.2199   68.1623   67.1088   79.2199   79.2199   79.2199  ±5.25%       10   fastest
   · @iarna/toml   3.5941    266.48    295.24    278.24    290.10    295.24    295.24    295.24  ±2.83%       10
   · @ltd/j-toml   0.7856  1,254.33  1,322.05  1,272.87  1,286.82  1,322.05  1,322.05  1,322.05  ±1.37%       10   slowest


 BENCH  Summary

  smol-toml - bench/parseLargeMixed.bench.ts >
    1.46x faster than fast-toml
    1.56x faster than @ltd/j-toml

  smol-toml - bench/parseSpecExample.bench.ts >
    2.12x faster than @iarna/toml
    2.43x faster than fast-toml
    4.34x faster than @ltd/j-toml

  smol-toml - bench/stringifyLargeMixed.bench.ts >
    4.00x faster than @iarna/toml
    18.33x faster than @ltd/j-toml

  smol-toml - bench/stringifySpecExample.bench.ts >
    4.19x faster than @iarna/toml
    34.42x faster than @ltd/j-toml

---

Additional notes:

I initially tried to benchmark toml-nodejs, but the 0.3.0 package is broken. I initially reported this to the library author, but the author decided to

• a) advise to use a custom loader (via experimental flag) to circumvent the invalid imports.
  • Said flag, --experimental-specifier-resolution, has been removed in Node v20.
• b) delete the issue when pointed out links to the NodeJS documentation about the flag removal and standard resolution algorithm.

For the reference anyway, toml-nodejs (with proper imports) is ~8x slower on both parse benchmark with:

• spec example: 7,543.47 op/s
• 5mb mixed: 0.7006 op/s