Two things make serde great: (1) It's format agnostic (2) everyone in the community uses it. My experience with other language ecosystem (I'm thinking Haskell

Two things make serde great: (1) It's format agnostic (2) everyone in the community uses it. My experience with other language ecosystem (I'm thinking Haskell or Scala) is that serialization/deserialization libraries are limited to one format, with incompatible APIs. Even if the libraries in those ecosystem provide the same kind of guarantees, it still doesn't compare to serde. Typically any framework or library (cats, play, scalaz, akka) will be either inflexible with format supports or require glue code (provided by the user of the library or a 3rd party) to even work with your pet codec library, which end up also limited to a specific storage format. With serde, the assumption is just that things work, and it's fantastic. Example: I have my web server (written in rust) communicating messages to the frontend (in elm) with a websocket. For fun, I decided to test druid's wasm output when it came out (druid is a UI framework), see how feasible it would be to replace the frontend. And I could just pick up the type definitions from my rust server, add a websocket dependency that works on wasm and _it just worked_! I could then switch from json to msgpack and it worked the same. The strength of rust is the community. There is a strong sense of collaboration and under the rich diversity of frameworks and high level libraries, there is a culture of modular and shared code and contributions that makes every thing that more flexible and reliable.