rubygems/rubygems.org — comment on commit 7699608ae2993a638f79b4aa00fe61ac8f6e511c
File:  line 0
By sferik:

There are a variety of reasons why we might want to switch JSON libraries again in the future. Maybe another JSON gem will leapfrog Yajl's performance. Maybe we'll run into some compatibility issue with Yajl in a future version of Ruby. This change allows us to easily swap out one JSON library for another. I'm not sure I can think of any downside, but maybe I'm missing something.