The codebase used to have a monkey patched version of gson that made special optimizations for the unusually large JSON files that used to store e.g. crawl data.
Since JSON is no longer used in this fashion, the GSON fork is not needed anymore.
Previously, in order to load encyclopedia data into the search engine, it was necessary to use the encyclopedia.marginalia.nu converter to first create a .db-file. This isn't very ergonomic, so parts of that code-base was lifted in as a 3rd party library, and conversion from .zim to .db is now done automatically.
The output file name is based on the original filename, plus a crc32 hash and a .db-ending, to ensure we can recycle the data on repeat loads.