No need to become offensive @epagone … the timing is the timing … as in many other threads in this forum … just search for them and you’ll be overwhelmed how often posters have wondered about being outperformed by Julia etc. And if you are in experimental mode I recommend more experiments … fread has just set the bar.
And please I would like to know how many people have finally decided to not learn Julia and go for fortran instead just because of the existence of Fortran json 
. I think self-indulging on these isolated examples blurs the vision … the future is not in making life for existing fortranners more easy (“thanks to xyz I don’t have to write this parser myself”) the future is in having a valid argument for beginners, and currently that is just not there as discussed here