rustc-serialize

Deprecated serialization/deserialization for Rust

Data & Databases

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2Distinct people

3Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

173GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Deprecated serialization/deserialization for Rust

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by hour3 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-05-05 21:09:20 UTC to 2017-05-05 23:18:17 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
May 5, 21:00	2017-05-05 21:00:00 UTC	2017-05-05 22:00:00 UTC	2	2
May 5, 22:00	2017-05-05 22:00:00 UTC	2017-05-05 23:00:00 UTC	0	0
May 5, 23:00	2017-05-05 23:00:00 UTC	2017-05-06 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

3 sources

Animats·May 5, 2017

rustc-serialize is deprecated It's the fourth most downloaded crate.[1] Somebody may have "deprecated" it, but the users aren't paying attention. It's not listed as "deprecated" on its own Cargo page.[2] There's a weak note about deprecation on its Github page, but users don't look there.[3] It has 2,950,353 downloads, probably because other crates are pulling it in. Will it be in the new set of "approved" packages? Or will all the crates that use it be fixed? Again, denial. Not seeing many links from the "everything is OK, don't need to look at this" crowd. [1] https://crates.io/ [2] https://crates.io/crates/rustc-serialize [3] https://github.com/rust-lang-deprecated/rustc-serialize

In The Rust Libs Blitz

crzwdjk·May 5, 2017

> which then turns up in the JSON decoder at (https://github.com/rust-lang-deprecated/rustc-serialize/blob...). There are no comments on the safety of that. Maybe there's a reason it's in a repository labeled "deprecated", namely that it's deprecated. The replacement serialization framework, serde, has exactly one appearance of "unsafe", in a function that is only compiled when you explicitly enable the "unstable" feature flag and that in fact appears to be a reasonably safe use of unsafe.

In The Rust Libs Blitz

Animats·May 5, 2017

We've seen this unsubstantiated denial before on YC, at "Why I’m dropping Rust"[1] and "Rust sucks if I fail to write X".[2] I once started going through the Rust library packages and listed uses of "unsafe". Try doing that. The previous discussions made a few things clear: - The big design-level problems with data structure safety are 1) partially initialized arrays, and 2) backlinks. The first is needed for growing arrays in Vec, and the second is needed for doubly-linked lists and some kinds of trees. It's very hard to handle either of those in safe Rust. A very small number of packages need unsafe code for those functions, and those should be tightly controlled. - Foreign code remains a problem, and is inherently unsafe when calling unsafe languages. The most downloaded Rust crate is "libc". What could possibly go wrong there? Was

Read the rest

it really a good idea to import unsafe "strcpy" into Rust? pub fn strcpy(dst: *mut c_char, src: *const c_char) -> *mut c_char; - There's a lot of use of "unsafe" code that's not strictly necessary. You find unsafe code like "from_utf8_unchecked", which then turns up in the JSON decoder at (https://github.com/rust-lang-deprecated/rustc-serialize/blob...). There are no comments on the safety of that. Is there some way to create bad JSON, get bad UTF-8 into a string, and cause trouble further upstream? I don't know, but somebody "optimized" there, and created a potential problem. I could give many more examples. Most of these problems are fixable. They're not inherent in Rust. Fixing them is important to Rust's credibility. If Rust is going to replace C++, which it should, the holes have to be plugged. It only takes one hole to create a security vulnerability. Denial is not a river in Egypt. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12474445 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13670366

In The Rust Libs Blitz