serbia

Serde big arrays. An attribute macro to make (de)serializing big arrays painless, following a design proposed by dtolnay.

Why?

I saw the idea in request-for-implementation. Then I came up with the name.

The name was too good. I had to do it. Don't judge me.

Also: Serbia has some tasty food.

But what is it for?

Serde only implements Serialize/Deserialize for arrays of length up to 32. This is due to Rust's current limitation - we can't be generic over array length, so an arbitrary upper limit was chosen and implementations were generated only up to it.

The crate provides a macro that generates all the code you need to (de)serialize arrays bigger than that.

Status

Under development, but functional. Let me know what's missing or broken!

Usage

Just slap #[serbia] on top of your type definition. Structs and enums both work!

use serbia::serbia;

#[serbia]
#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)]
struct S {
    arr_a: [u8; 300],
    arr_b: [u8; 42],
    arr_small: [u8; 8],
}

#[serbia]
#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)]
enum E {
    ArrBig([u8; 300]),
    ArrSmall([u8; 22]),
    Mixed([u8; 8], [i32; 44], String),
}

You can use the #[serbia_bufsize( ... )] attribute to set a buffer size for a field. This can be useful for type aliases. Constants work here!

const BUFSIZE: usize = 300;
type BigArray = [i32; BUFSIZE];

#[serbia]
#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)]
struct S {
    #[serbia_bufsize(BUFSIZE)]
    arr_a: BigArray,
    foo: String,
}