Glad to be here! My github account is @HollowMan6. Though I'm new to MariaDB community, I'm interested in MDEV-16375 & MDEV-23143: Function to normalize a json value & missing a JSON_EQUALS function for this year's GSOC project. Here are my first thoughts on these issues:

   I have checked part of the codebase and I think the two issues can be merged into one. First we can create a function named JSON_NORMALIZE to normalize the json, which automatically parses the inputed json document, recursively sorts the keys (for objects) / sorts the numbers (for arrays), removes the spaces, and then return the json document string.

   Then we create a function named JSON_EQUALS, which can be used to compare 2 json documents for equality realized by first seperately normalize the two json documents using JSON_NORMALIZE, then the 2 can be compared exactly as binary strings.

   I have taken some inspirations from the Item_func_json_keys and json_scan_start for parsing json documents, and I think it's possible to sort the keys using std::map in STL for objects.

   That's all for my ideas so far. Please correct me if I made some mistakes, and I'm going to work on my ideas later.

Cheers!

Hollow Man