It is a (de)serialization framework that can be quite easily implemented for various serialization formats like JSON, MessagePack, Yaml, toml, ...
It enables automatic and very performant (de)serialization of you data, into different formats.
Often with a simple:
` #[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)] struct Data { ... } `
I just found out recently that there's a couple work-arounds but none of them were obvious and for a framework that is zero-allocation based not having great support for arrays was a non-starter since that's 90% of the structures I was working with.
I love Rust but I feel like arrays in general are somewhat of an unfinished part of the language, you run into similar problems with Clone and Debug which can be frustrating.
I guess it's just jarring since the rest of Rust is so well crafted it felt really abrupt to run up against the 32 length fixed size limits. It's also somewhat annoying to have to coerce it into a slice via &array[..] instead of &array.
It's workable and when I finally get the library to a stable state I definitely plan to share what went well and where I saw pain points.
It looks like deserialization is mostly there, but not serialization.
I've never used it, but one benefit of Avro is that it can embed the schema in the serialized output, which allows clients to consume data even though they don't have the IDL, which isn't possible with Protobuf and Thrift. MessagePack does include types and map keys, but doesn't have a schema.
(Never heard of it either)