deser
Deser is an experimental serialization system for Rust. It wants to explore the
possibilities of serialization and deserialization of structural formats such as
JSON or msgpack. It intentionally does not desire to support non self describing
formats such as bincode.
Design Goals
- Fast Compile Times: deser avoids excessive monomorphization by encouraging dynamic dispatch.
- Unlimited Recursion: the real world is nasty and incoming data might be badly nested.
Do not exhaust the call stack no matter how deep your data is.
- Simple Data Model: deser simplifies the data model on the serialization and deserialization
interface but compensates by providing descriptors that provide auxiliary information for when
a serializer wants to process it.
- Extensible Data Model: deser wants to make it possible to extend the data model with types
that are not native to the serialization interface. For instance if a data format wants to
support arbitrarily sized integers this should be possible without falling back to in-band
signalling.
- Meta Information: deser compensates the simplified data model with providing a space to
hold meta information.
- Native Byte Serialization: deser has built-in specialization for serializing bytes and
byte vectors as distinct formats from slices and vectors.
Crates
- deser: the core crate
providing the base functionality
- deser-path: a crate
that extends deser to track the path during serialization
- deser-debug: formats
a serializable to the
std::fmt debug format
Inspiration
This crate heavily borrows from
miniserde,
serde and Sentry Relay's meta
system. The general trait design was
modelled after miniserde.
Safety
Deser (currently) uses excessive amounts of unsafe code internally. It is not vetted and
it is likely completely wrong. If this design turns out to be useful there will be need
to be a re-design of the internals.
License and Links