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Avro support, just like all other Serde data formats, lives in its own crate. https://crates.io/crates/serde-avro

I keep picking this up to try and help and then dropping it. I wish I had more time in the day.

It looks like deserialization is mostly there, but not serialization.

What's Avro?

Looks like a data serialization format: https://avro.apache.org/

(Never heard of it either)

It allows you to define a schema, and then compile it to various languages and have multiple applications in multiple languages "speak" the same class, down to the binary level (for RPC, blob storage etc).

It's not as popular as Protocol Buffers, Thrift, MessagePack etc., probably because it started out in Java land (I believe it came from Doug Nutch of Lucene fame).

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.

s/Doug Nutch/Doug Cutting/

Oops. That should have been "Doug Cutting of Nutch and Lucene fame".