In python-land, I like to use glom[1], which is basically jq but operating on arbitrary python data structures. I believe there are bindings for jq in python in other languages, which would allow operating on data structures, but I imagine they are just spawning jq as a subprocess, since it doesn't seem like jq has a public C api.

[1] https://glom.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html