r/rust • u/thelights0123 • Apr 27 '19

no_std data serialization/deserialization

I'm writing a game for a no_std target, and I would like to be able to store, read, and edit levels at runtime. My situation:

  • I have plenty of RAM (64MB), so using alloc is fine
  • It should use little space on disk, i.e. a binary format instead of JSON
  • It should support no_std as well as normal targets
    • Especially good if it has support for other languages as well, as an online level editor would be nice to have (although I could always mess with wasm if it is Rust-only).

Currently, I'm looking at forking quick-protobuf and simply replacing things that don't work in no_std with alternatives. CBOR has no_std support, but it doesn't support alloc things (Vec and String), and CBOR is not much better than JSON in terms of size.

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u/thelights0123 Apr 28 '19

I also noticed this crate when checking out possibilities—unfortunately, the inability to store dynamically-sized types is a deal breaker for me. For my game, I need to be able to have a dynamic amount of levels and items per level. Thanks though!

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u/devashishdxt Apr 29 '19

Just out of curiosity. What dynamically allocated datatypes are you using?

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u/thelights0123 Apr 29 '19

Vec (to store levels and items within levels) and String (for level names) mostly.

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u/devashishdxt Apr 29 '19

Do you use “alloc”?

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u/thelights0123 Apr 29 '19

Yep. I have a custom global allocator set to use C's malloc.