It's too bad there aren't more streaming JSON parsers like oboe.js[1]. It would be nice if parsing libraries always supplied an event-based approach like this in addition to parsers that build up the entire data structure in memory.

[1]: https://github.com/jimhigson/oboe.js

EDIT: looking around a bit, I found json-stream ( https://github.com/dgraham/json-stream ) for Ruby.