FastSerial

fastserial is a high-performance, zero-copy serialization and deserialization framework for Rust. It is an ambitious project designed as an alternative for high-throughput use cases like REST APIs, game engines, and real-time data processing, focusing on minimizing overhead and maximizing efficiency.

🚀 Key Features

• Ambitious Performance: Designed for high throughput by using specialized code generation and SIMD-accelerated scanning.
• Zero-Copy Deserialization: Borrow directly from input buffers (e.g., &str, &[u8]) to avoid heap allocations.
• SIMD-First Design: Native AVX2 and SSE4.2 support for parsing and escaping.
• Minimal Dependencies: Fast compilation and small binary footprint.
• No-Std Support: Optimized for embedded environments and WASM.

📦 Installation

Add this to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
fastserial = "0.1.0"

🛠️ Usage

use fastserial::{Encode, Decode, json};

#[derive(Encode, Decode, Debug, PartialEq)]
struct User<'a> {
    id: u64,
    username: &'a str,
    email: String,
    #[fastserial(skip)]
    password_hash: String,
}

fn main() -> Result<(), fastserial::Error> {
    let user = User {
        id: 1,
        username: "j4flmao",
        email: "dev@fastserial.rs".into(),
        password_hash: "secret_hash".into(),
    };

    // Serialize to JSON
    let json_data = json::encode(&user)?;
    println!("{}", String::from_utf8_lossy(&json_data));

    // Deserialize back (zero-copy for username)
    let decoded: User = json::decode(&json_data)?;
    assert_eq!(user.username, decoded.username);

    Ok(())
}

🛠️ Development

This project uses a Makefile to simplify common development tasks.

# Run all quality checks (fmt, lint, test, build)
make all

# Run specific tasks
make test        # Run all tests
make lint        # Run clippy
make fmt         # Format code
make build       # Build workspace
make doc         # Generate documentation
make run-sample  # Run the sample-axum application

📊 Performance Goals

fastserial aims for high performance by focusing on specific optimizations like SIMD and zero-copy. For detailed performance aspirations and initial experimental numbers, see docs/BENCHMARKS.md.

⚙️ Configuration

• std (default): Enables std support.
• json (default): Enables JSON codec.
• binary (default): Enables the FastSerial binary format.
• msgpack: Enables MessagePack codec.
• chrono: Enables support for chrono types.
• HashMap / BTreeMap serialization support.
• Tuple serialization support.
• json::Value dynamic type for untyped JSON.
• json::encode_pretty for human-readable output.

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md for details on our development workflow and how to get started.

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.