postcard VS cJSON

I've been enjoying postcard as a lightweight efficient binary serialization.

That said, postcard is not a self describing format (so everyone needs the same schema, no changes allowed), but I do have a tracking issue open for ways to handle this in the future.

For example, look at the Postcard serializer for inspiration.

Serde should be no_std, I have used it embedded with crates such as postcard. You can see how postcard disables default features of serde here : https://github.com/jamesmunns/postcard/blob/main/Cargo.toml

Another option that may work for some is SerDe on rust. You just write a struct with the fields you want #[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)] above it, and if codegens the functions to deserialize that struct from JSON and serialize it back. Example looks like this https://docs.rs/serde_json/latest/serde_json/#creating-json-by-serializing-data-structures (but you have to use serde-json-core if you don’t have an allocator). Can also easily reserialize to something small like postcard that’s meant for embedded storage.

https://github.com/jamesmunns/postcard

postcard seems like it would be particularly strong for the wasm use case as it produces small messages that are light in memory.

It’s a library he’s including directly. It’s the same.

https://github.com/DaveGamble/cJSON

a quick google search is always easier than a whole reddit post cJSON

This is quite similar to cJSON, although cJSON leans more towards dynamic memory allocation.

If 'de-factoness' (urgh) was measured in GitHub stars, then https://github.com/DaveGamble/cJSON would win.

You often end up with cases where you have to manually call the correct free function for the type you're using, again completely untyped - e.g. if I'm using both sentry and cjson, then my function will ook something like this:

Nice how would you compare this to DaveGambles cJSON? https://github.com/DaveGamble/cJSON (which I what I currently use)