Contribution to gnata

[sandrolain]

Hi gnata team

I'm writing through a GitHub issue since I couldn't find a more direct way to reach the maintainers — apologies if this isn't the right channel!

I've been building a JSONata-to-Go port in my spare time called gosonata (using Copilot with Claude Sonnet), but rather than maintaining a parallel fork I'd much prefer to contribute back to gnata, which already has more traction and a wider audience — meaning improvements will get better feedback and reach more users. I'm also evaluating JSONata for IoT data-pipeline work at M31, the company I work at, so having a solid and well-maintained Go implementation matters to me.

To help with the analysis I used GitHub Copilot with Claude Sonnet 4.6, running a comparative audit between gnata and gosonata cross-checked against the official JSONata 2.1 test suite.

From that work I identified some areas that could be worth evaluating together — things like closer alignment to the JSONata spec, performance improvements, and additional features. Rather than listing them all here, I'd invite you to have a look at gosonata directly, or just ask me anything — I'm happy to share details, open issues, or send PRs, whatever works best for you.

Cheers,
Sandro

[NirBarak-RecoLabs]

Hey @sandrolain,

Yes, we were excited to hear the project resonated with the community, and it's equally interesting that we're not the only ones who came up with the idea of a full rewrite for production workflows.

We welcome additions, but I'll preface that though this is an open-source project we do use it internally. As such, we currently prefer to do our own PRs. This will probably change eventually, but it's still very early on so we're being more strict.

If you have any issues you'd like addressed (such as jsonata compatibility / performance issues), feel free to share them here. Alternatively you could contact me directly.

Thanks!