Constructors are the only odd duck for which there is no efficient alternative. You either generate a delegate at runtime to call the right constructor, or you have to use reflection/Activate.CreateInstance.
What's the reason you can't use AoT compilation together with serialization? The only thing that's problematic is reflection, but I wouldn't use reflection in my serialization if I can help it.
I am not going to enter into a debate about the merits of various serializers, but if netwonsoft.json doesn’t run, that’s half of the nuget packages that cannot run in that app. That pretty much guaranties its failure in term of adoption.
Yeah I didn’t even consider text based serialization (json, xml). I know there is at least a couple of aot-aware json.net ports but obviously those aren’t going to be what existing packages use. It seems like a pretty small hurdle though. Once AoT is commonplace more packages will support it, including json.net. It might take three years or ten, but it will happen (I consider 5 years to be a blink of an eye in this space...)
