miniserde VS nanoserde

It's pretty common to avoid macros as they can seem too magical a lot of the time. And with traits, there's experiments like miniserde which specifically avoid monomorphization overhead. I also see people who want to avoid having lots of dependencies relatively often.

Right now, the next step would be to try to reimplement miniserde with venial, and publish benchmarks.

The only downside is compile time bloat.

Serde generates heaps and heaps of generic code. This gets optimized away to be very efficient, but it can be quite cumbersome.

Ever tried working on a crate with hundreds or thousands of de/serializable types? Compile times shoot through the roof really quickly.

The maintainer of serde also created `miniserde` [1], which uses dynamic dispatch and can have 4x compile time improvements.

Due to Rusts lack of orphan instances you really depend on a pervasive standard for serializiation which is used by all libraries, so the ecosystem is really locked in to serde by now.

[1] https://github.com/dtolnay/miniserde

what do you think of the parser in nanoserde? https://github.com/not-fl3/nanoserde/blob/master/derive/src/parse.rs

Yeah proc macros have a massive hole in their user experience. Nobody actually wants to use them without syn + quote functionality, so the majority of people just pay the compile time cost of syn/quote/procmacro2. But then a subset of people can't afford to pay the compile time cost, so they either: 1. Don't use them. And remove all of their deps that use them ... which is generally a lot. 2. Hand-manage the TokenStream (which is very much not fun). Macroquad doesn't want syn + quote in their tree because they care _deeply about compile times, so they opted to re-implement serde. Serde is the crowned jewel of the rust ecosystem. Someone feeling unable to use it is a massive failure of the system.