Resources

Learning Materials

• The rkyv book covers the motivation, architecture, and major features of rkyv
• The rkyv discord is a great place to get help with specific issues and meet other people using rkyv

Documentation

• rkyv, the core library
• rkyv_dyn, which adds trait object support to rkyv
• rkyv_typename, a type naming library

Benchmarks

• The rust serialization benchmark is a shootout style benchmark comparing many rust serialization solutions. It includes special benchmarks for zero-copy serialization solutions like rkyv.

Sister Crates

• bytecheck, which rkyv uses for validation
• ptr_meta, which rkyv uses for pointer manipulation
• rend, which rkyv uses for endian-agnostic features

Example

use rkyv::{
    archived_root,
    ser::{serializers::AllocSerializer, Serializer},
    Archive, Deserialize, Infallible, Serialize,
};

#[derive(Archive, Deserialize, Serialize, Debug, PartialEq)]
struct Test {
    int: u8,
    string: String,
    option: Option<Vec<i32>>,
}

let value = Test {
    int: 42,
    string: "hello world".to_string(),
    option: Some(vec![1, 2, 3, 4]),
};

let mut serializer = AllocSerializer::<256>::default();
serializer.serialize_value(&value).unwrap();
let bytes = serializer.into_serializer().into_inner();

let archived = unsafe { archived_root::<Test>(&bytes[..]) };
assert_eq!(archived.int, value.int);
assert_eq!(archived.string, value.string);
assert_eq!(archived.option, value.option);

let deserialized: Test = archived.deserialize(&mut Infallible).unwrap()
assert_eq!(deserialized, value);