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Reimplement #[bitcode(with_serde)]

Open caibear opened this issue 1 year ago • 4 comments

There have been many requests for supporting 3rd party crates such as: time, rust_decimal, uuid, and chrono. Rather than implementing support manually for these crates and more, an easier solution is to allow types implementing serde::Serialize inside types implementing bitcode::Encode.

This was previously a feature in 0.5, but we didn't reimplement it in the 0.6 rewrite due due to technical limitations. I have since found a path forward and intend to add this feature to 0.6.

The downsides of using serde instead of implementing these types in native bitcode are:

  1. Worse performance
  2. Requiring #[bitcode(with_serde)] annotations on every field where serde is used
  3. Doesn't work well on collection types since it forces everything inside them to use serde

1 and 2 aren't much of an issue if serde is used infrequently. 3 poses more of an issue, but so far none of the types requested are collections. We could mitigate it by implementing some of the popular collections such as IndexMap.

caibear avatar Sep 24 '24 18:09 caibear

Downside 4: serialize returns a Result, so encode would either have to return a Result (breaks compatibility with 0.6) or panic on Err from serialize.

Still in favor of this, though!

finnbear avatar Sep 24 '24 18:09 finnbear

Implementing this would partially-fully resolve these open issues: #45 could use serde_repr to serialize enum as u16 #40 #39 #38 #37 #35 bitcode serde already supports recursive types, so you could embed them in bitcode::Encode types #33 #29 use serde on field you want to skip with serialize impl that does nothing #27 #24 #13 #58

caibear avatar Sep 24 '24 18:09 caibear

I would like to ask if we use #[bitcode(with_serde) for example with uuid::Uuid, do we get to choose which representation we want (something similar with {de}serialize_with) because I think most people will want to encode an Uuid with u128 instead of a str (no one will open the bitcode message to read anyway :D).

vnghia avatar Sep 25 '24 06:09 vnghia

most people will want to encode an Uuid with [bytes] instead of a str

The correct choice is made automatically, considering uuid checks whether the format is human readable. bitcode is not human readable, so uuid uses raw bytes.

finnbear avatar Sep 25 '24 07:09 finnbear