postcard VS zcbor

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.

Tinycbor is quite messy since you need one var for each map, element and level, for no reason. I ported all my cbor code to zcbor which is a lot cleaner.