I agree with you. I'd like to see Rust change to allow defining traits on foreign types, somehow. I've discussed this a number of times with folks on the Rust

I agree with you. I'd like to see Rust change to allow defining traits on foreign types, somehow. I've discussed this a number of times with folks on the Rust community Discord. There are unfortunately obstacles to making this happen. One obstacle is that if you implement a trait for a type, then that implementation applies to it everywhere, including in all other library code using the type. By implementing a trait you change its behavior in surprising and likely conflicting ways. Additionally, if you were to implement `Serialize` for some struct, then that would also directly conflict with the struct owner trying to do the same thing. My proposed solution to this problem is to conceptualized trait implementations as something that can be `use`d. The basic idea is that, if I implement `Serialize` for `Foo` (and `Foo` comes from another namespace) then the type-trait implementation remains private to mine (or perhaps, private to my namespace). That's not how Rust works today, but I'd be curious whether it could work. I realize this will create a new set of challenges. It will mean `Foo` comes with one set of behavior everywhere else, and another set of behavior in my namespaces where the trait is implemented for it. I don't know enough about Rust to foresee what kind of problems this would cause, but it seems tempting to explore. Usually the kinds of traits that you'd want to implement are not ones that will cause problems for other code.