Experimental Rust Serialization Library. [![Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/erickt/rust-serde.png?branch=master)](https://travis-ci.org/erickt/rust-serde) This is an experiment to modernize rust's `libserialize` library. It is designed to implement https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/22. `rust-serde` is an attempt to address a major shortcoming in `libserialize`. For normal structures, when you say you want to deserialize into: ```rust struct Foo { x: int, y: int, } ``` `libserialize`'s deserializer essentially asks for: * Is the next value a struct named "Foo"? If not, error. * Is the next field named "x"? If not, error. * Is the next value an "int"? If not, error. * Is the next field named "y"? If not, error. * Is the next value an "int"? If not, error. * Is the struct finished? If not, error. While this works for user defined structures, it cannot support deserializing into a value like `json::Json`, which is an enum that can represent every JSON value. In order to support that, it needs to be able to do some lookahead: * What is the next value type? * If a struct, parse a struct. * If an integer, parse an integer. * ... More formally, `libserialize` implements a LL(0) grammar, whereas `json::Json` requires a LL(1) grammar. `rust-serde` provides this by implementing a serializer and deserializer that produces a tagged token stream of values. This enables a `Deserializable` for `json::Json` to look at the next token before deciding on how to parse the value. --- There is now also a new library variation called `serde2`. This removes the need for tagged values and replaces them with a `Visitor` pattern. This pattern is very similar to the `Iterator` pattern, but it threads some custom state through visiting each type. This gets many of the benefits of the `serde` library without needing to always pay for tagging the variants.