I understand what you and OP are getting at and I'm saying it's wrong but it misses the broader point that others posters were positing. The exact same point I came to make but found myself in good company. Why?!? And it's not specific to JS or a direct criticism of JS, this issue it becoming endemic. It's happening everywhere now. We shouldn't have to depend on language specific hacks to make things "work" in that language. JS has gotten so out of hand now we have/need new metalanguages like TypeScript, CoffeeScript, Bable, (insert buzzwordy JS lang here) that transpiles into JS because it's become so unwieldy. All this just to be able to make a simple web app. The fact that V8 can parse JSON faster than processing a native JS literal is a compiler problem. Why is it suddenly my problem? It's one thing if it's a bug that we have to temporarily work around (these things happen) but now it's becoming the norm. How are people new to the industry supposed to learn something like JS if the only way to be proficient at it is through an endless, ever changing array of hacks? Especially when it's something as counterintuitive as parsing a string is somehow faster than the actual equivalent code. The "move fast and break things" mentality that has permeated tech as of late has done just that, got us nowhere fast and broke everything along the way.