miniserde

I'm glad serde exists but I don't like HOW it works: I think there should be a push for rust-lang to provide introspection. If you want to use serde, every crate needs to derive serde traits as well. This is not only bad architecture but it also prevents other libraries to get popular. For example, there are many "mini-serde" variants and I personally think, they are awesome (and surprisingly fast), yet you cannot practically use them because literally no crate supports anything else than serde. https://github.com/dtolnay/miniserde https://github.com/not-fl3/nanoserde https://github.com/makepad/makepad/tree/master/render/micros...

The only downside is compile time bloat. Serde generates heaps and heaps of generic code. This all gets optimized away to be very efficient, but only once it reaches LLVM. Ever tried working on a crate with hundreds or thousands of de/serializable types? Compile times shoot through the roof really quickly, and serde is often the culprit. The maintainer of serde also created `miniserde` [1] to tackle this problem, which uses dynamic dispatch instead of generics and can have 4x compile time improvements. Due to Rusts lack of orphan instances you really depend on a pervasive standard for serialization, though, so the ecosystem is pretty locked in to serde. [1] https://github.com/dtolnay/miniserde

Did you ever take a look at miniserde? It's pretty much just an experiment (e.g. no support for enums), but it seems like the general approach it takes would cut down the amount of code per type. [0] https://github.com/dtolnay/miniserde