serde
Fewer than 5 people recommend it so far, so there's no written verdict. Here is what commenters said.
2recommend
7warn against
Nov 4, 2025first mention
Aug 20, 2026latest mention
Why people recommend it
Caveats and dissent
“bloated libraries like serde that insist on generating code which massively slows down compilation for not much benefit”
“pulling in 42M of dependencies”
Show 2 more
“I was about to say serde doesn't do it”
“I love Serde to death, but the compile times are getting absolutely absurd.”
Often compared with
Threads where it came up
- Malicious Rust Crate Arrayref Runs a Build-Time Payload 2 mentions
- The Rust Performance Book (2020) 2 mentions
- Functional Programmers need to take a look at Zig 1 mention
- An Incoherent Rust 1 mention
- We rewrote our Rust WASM Parser in TypeScript – and it got 3x Faster 1 mention
- Rust Is Just a Tool 1 mention
Also written as Serde. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 13
On the topic of RNG, the functionality of the getrandom crate is getting ready to be exposed from libstd: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/157168
“serde (the most popular) is far from universally agreed upon.”
“bloated libraries like serde that insist on generating code which massively slows down compilation for not much benefit”
“If I use serde, I cannot use a crate that only implements nextserde.”
By the way, I did a deeper dive on the problem of serializing objects across the Rust/JS boundary, noticed the approach used by serde wasn’t great for performance, and explored improving it here: https://neugierig.org/software/blog/2024/04/rust-wasm-to-js.html
“Two arbitrary picks:”
“custom Serde encoder/decoder”
“pulling in 42M of dependencies”
“I was about to say serde doesn't do it”
“Also there's serde.”
“I love Serde to death, but the compile times are getting absolutely absurd.”
“skipping proc macros or Serde for faster compile times”
“I’m not a fan of serde either.”