serde-rs/serde

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

10784 stars · 936 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Serde is Rust's standard serialization and deserialization framework, built on the trait system with compile-time derive macros instead of runtime reflection. It lets any data structure be converted to and from any supported data format such as JSON, YAML, TOML, CBOR, or MessagePack with near-handwritten performance.

Use cases

• serialize rust structs to json
• deserialize api responses into typed structs
• parse configuration files like toml or yaml into rust types
• convert data structures to compact binary formats for embedded systems
• generate serialize and deserialize implementations automatically with derive macros
• exchange data between rust services over http apis

When to choose

• you need efficient, type-safe serialization in Rust without reflection overhead
• you want one data model that works across many formats (JSON, YAML, TOML, CBOR, etc.)
• you are targeting no_std or embedded environments and need a compact format like Postcard
• you want compile-time generated implementations via #[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)]

When to avoid

• you are not working in Rust
• you need runtime-flexible serialization of dynamically typed data with schema evolution
• you need a format Serde has no community crate for

Facets

library · maturity stable

serialization parser developer-tools developer-tools web-development apis embedded-systems rust cross-platform embedded wasm derive-macros no-std json yaml toml messagepack trait-based

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