rkyv (archive) is a zero-copy deserialization framework for Rust

Resources

Learning Materials

• The rkyv book covers the motivation, architecture, and major features of rkyv
• The rkyv discord is a great place to get help with specific issues and meet other people using rkyv

Documentation

• rkyv, the core library
• rkyv_dyn, which adds trait object support to rkyv
• rkyv_typename, a type naming library

Benchmarks

• The rust serialization benchmark is a shootout style benchmark comparing many rust serialization solutions. It includes special benchmarks for zero-copy serialization solutions like rkyv.

Sister Crates

• bytecheck, which rkyv uses for validation
• ptr_meta, which rkyv uses for pointer manipulation
• rend, which rkyv uses for endian-agnostic features

Example

```rust use rkyv::{Archive, Deserialize, Serialize}; // bytecheck can be used to validate your data if you want use bytecheck::CheckBytes;

[derive(Archive, Deserialize, Serialize, Debug, PartialEq)]

// This will generate a PartialEq impl between our unarchived and archived types

[archive(compare(PartialEq))]

// To use the safe API, you have to derive CheckBytes for the archived type

[archive_attr(derive(CheckBytes, Debug))]

struct Test { int: u8, string: String, option: Option>, }

let value = Test { int: 42, string: "hello world".to_string(), option: Some(vec![1, 2, 3, 4]), };

// Serializing is as easy as a single function call let bytes = rkyv::to_bytes::<_, 256>(&value).unwrap();

// Or you can customize your serialization for better performance // and compatibility with #![no_std] environments use rkyv::ser::{Serializer, serializers::AllocSerializer};

let mut serializer = AllocSerializer::<0>::default(); serializer.serializevalue(&value).unwrap(); let bytes = serializer.intoserializer().into_inner();

// You can use the safe API for fast zero-copy deserialization let archived = rkyv::checkarchivedroot::(&bytes[..]).unwrap(); assert_eq!(archived, &value);

// Or you can use the unsafe API for maximum performance let archived = unsafe { rkyv::archivedroot::(&bytes[..]) }; asserteq!(archived, &value);

// And you can always deserialize back to the original type let deserialized: Test = archived.deserialize(&mut rkyv::Infallible).unwrap(); assert_eq!(deserialized, value); ```

Note: the safe API requires the validation feature:

toml rkyv = { version = "0.7", features = ["validation"] }

Read more about available features.