Serialize a struct/enum to bytes [duplicate]

Question

I'd like to serialize my struct to binary and de-serialize it on the other end of the pipe. Is there a way to achieve this with the serialize crate? It seems to only support JSON, hex and base64.

Answer 1

I would suggest bincode.

It provides encode() and decode() functions which operate on anything with RustcEncodable & RustcDecodable traits, which can generally be #[derive]d, and return Vec<u8>.

It has a few quirks (isize and usize become i64 and u64, for example), but they are mostly there to improve portability and it tends to work as you would expect.