miniserde VS trophy-case

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

You could check cargo-fuzz trophy case, which is a list of issues that have been found via fuzzing.

I've added it to the trophy case.

That said, what's present in what quantities under what circumstances in the Rust fuzzing trophy case does a pretty good job of illustrating how effective the Rust compiler is at ruling out entire classes of bugs.

The same fuzzing techniques applied to Rust yielded a lot of bugs as well. But in Rust's case only 7 out of 340 fuzzer-discovered bugs, or 2%, were memory corruption issues. Naturally, all of the memory corruption bugs were in unsafe code.

https://github.com/rust-fuzz/trophy-case has like 70 of my issues in it, including the nine minidump bugs

If you have found any bugs with this tool, perhaps add them to the Rust fuzz trophy case?

Source: https://github.com/rust-fuzz/trophy-case (over 40 of those are just from me).

But to bring some data, check out the fuzz trophy case. It shows that failures in Rust are most often assertions/panics (equivalent to C++ exception) with memory corruption being relatively rare (it's not never—Rust isn't promising magic—but it's a significant change).

You need to read the list more carefully.

• The list is not for Rust itself, but every program every written in Rust. By itself it doesn't mean much, unless you compare prevalence of issues among Rust programs to prevalence of issues among C programs. For some context, see how memory unsafety is rare compared to assertions and uncaught exceptions: https://github.com/rust-fuzz/trophy-case

• Many of the memory-unsafety issues are on the C FFI boundary, which is unsafe due to C lacking expressiveness about memory ownership of its APIs (i.e. it shows how dangerous is to program where you don't have the Rust borrow checker checking your code).

• Many bugs about missing Send/Sync or evil trait implementations are about type-system loopholes that prevented compiler from catching code that was already buggy. C doesn't have these guarantees in the first place, so lack of them is not a CVE for C, but just how C is designed.