erased-serde 0.3.0

This crate provides type-erased versions of Serde's Serialize, Serializer and Deserializer traits that can be used as trait objects.

The usual Serde Serialize, Serializer and Deserializer traits cannot be used as trait objects like &Serialize or boxed trait objects like Box<Serialize> because of Rust's "object safety" rules. In particular, all three traits contain generic methods which cannot be made into a trait object.

The traits in this crate work seamlessly with any existing Serde Serialize and Deserialize type and any existing Serde Serializer and Deserializer format.

Serialization

extern crate erased_serde;
extern crate serde_json;
extern crate serde_cbor;

use std::collections::BTreeMap as Map;
use std::io;

use erased_serde::{Serialize, Serializer};

fn main() {
    // Construct some serializers.
    let json = &mut serde_json::ser::Serializer::new(io::stdout());
    let cbor = &mut serde_cbor::ser::Serializer::new(io::stdout());

    // The values in this map are boxed trait objects. Ordinarily this would not
    // be possible with serde::Serializer because of object safety, but type
    // erasure makes it possible with erased_serde::Serializer.
    let mut formats: Map<&str, Box<Serializer>> = Map::new();
    formats.insert("json", Box::new(Serializer::erase(json)));
    formats.insert("cbor", Box::new(Serializer::erase(cbor)));

    // These are boxed trait objects as well. Same thing here - type erasure
    // makes this possible.
    let mut values: Map<&str, Box<Serialize>> = Map::new();
    values.insert("vec", Box::new(vec!["a", "b"]));
    values.insert("int", Box::new(65536));

    // Pick a Serializer out of the formats map.
    let format = formats.get_mut("json").unwrap();

    // Pick a Serialize out of the values map.
    let value = values.get("vec").unwrap();

    // This line prints `["a","b"]` to stdout.
    value.erased_serialize(format).unwrap();
}

Deserialization

extern crate erased_serde;
extern crate serde_json;
extern crate serde_cbor;

use std::collections::BTreeMap as Map;

use erased_serde::Deserializer;

fn main() {
    static JSON: &'static [u8] = br#"{"A": 65, "B": 66}"#;
    static CBOR: &'static [u8] = &[162, 97, 65, 24, 65, 97, 66, 24, 66];

    // Construct some deserializers.
    let json = &mut serde_json::de::Deserializer::from_slice(JSON);
    let cbor = &mut serde_cbor::de::Deserializer::new(CBOR);

    // The values in this map are boxed trait objects, which is not possible
    // with the normal serde::Deserializer because of object safety.
    let mut formats: Map<&str, Box<Deserializer>> = Map::new();
    formats.insert("json", Box::new(Deserializer::erase(json)));
    formats.insert("cbor", Box::new(Deserializer::erase(cbor)));

    // Pick a Deserializer out of the formats map.
    let format = formats.get_mut("json").unwrap();

    let data: Map<String, usize> = erased_serde::deserialize(format).unwrap();

    println!("{}", data["A"] + data["B"]);
}