Crate serde[][src]

Serde

Serde is a framework for serializing and deserializing Rust data structures efficiently and generically.

The Serde ecosystem consists of data structures that know how to serialize and deserialize themselves along with data formats that know how to serialize and deserialize other things. Serde provides the layer by which these two groups interact with each other, allowing any supported data structure to be serialized and deserialized using any supported data format.

See the Serde website https://serde.rs/ for additional documentation and usage examples.

Design

Where many other languages rely on runtime reflection for serializing data, Serde is instead built on Rust's powerful trait system. A data structure that knows how to serialize and deserialize itself is one that implements Serde's Serialize and Deserialize traits (or uses Serde's derive attribute to automatically generate implementations at compile time). This avoids any overhead of reflection or runtime type information. In fact in many situations the interaction between data structure and data format can be completely optimized away by the Rust compiler, leaving Serde serialization to perform the same speed as a handwritten serializer for the specific selection of data structure and data format.

Data formats

The following is a partial list of data formats that have been implemented for Serde by the community.

Modules

de

Generic data structure deserialization framework.

ser

Generic data structure serialization framework.

Macros

forward_to_deserialize_any

Helper macro when implementing the Deserializer part of a new data format for Serde.

serde_if_integer128

Conditional compilation depending on whether Serde is built with support for 128-bit integers.

Traits

Deserialize

A data structure that can be deserialized from any data format supported by Serde.

Deserializer

A data format that can deserialize any data structure supported by Serde.

Serialize

A data structure that can be serialized into any data format supported by Serde.

Serializer

A data format that can serialize any data structure supported by Serde.