Crate serde_arrays

Serialize and deserialize const generic or arbitrarily-large arrays with Serde.

Out of the box, Serde supports a lot of types, but unfortunately lacks support for arrays that use const generics. This library provides a module that, in combination with Serde’s with attribute, adds that support.

Example usage

use serde::{Serialize, Deserialize};
use serde_json;

#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize, Debug, PartialEq, Eq)]
struct GenericArray<const N: usize> {
    #[serde(with = "serde_arrays")]
    arr: [u32; N],
}

let data = GenericArray{ arr: [1; 16] };
let json = serde_json::to_string(&data)?;
let de_data = serde_json::from_str(&json)?;

assert_eq!(data, de_data);

As an added bonus, this also adds support for arbitrarily large arrays beyond the 32 elements that Serde supports:

#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize, Debug, PartialEq, Eq)]
struct LargeArray {
    #[serde(with = "serde_arrays")]
    arr: [u32; 64],
}

Tuple structs are supported just as easily:

#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize, Debug, PartialEq, Eq)]
struct TupleStruct<const N: usize>(
    #[serde(with = "serde_arrays")]
    [u32; N],
);

MSRV

This library relies on the const generics feature introduced in Rust 1.51.0.

Relevant links

• The Serde issue for const generics support
• serde-big-array is a similar crate, but it depends on unsafe code (whether its use of such is safe or not is beyond this scope)

Functions

• deserialize
  Deserialize const generic or arbitrarily-large arrays
• serialize
  Serialize const generic or arbitrarily-large arrays