I think of what you call "Encoder" as a "Visitor" (just in case you're looking for renaming input :)
So the function that you are generating at runtime is similar to a template function in C++, templated on the specific serializer (Encoder/Visitor/etc).
One thing that this approach does not currently support (which admittedly is probably not required for most users, and is probably not in line with the overall design of Rust) is the ability to resume. Suppose you are serializing to a socket and the socket is not write-ready. You would need to block until the socket is write-ready (or allocate a buffer to hold the serialized data). This interface doesn't provide a way of suspending the visit/encode and resuming it later.
This also doesn't seem to have a way of identifying the fields -- is this true? Like if you were trying to encode as JSON but wanted to know the name of each field?
`encode_field` has the name in it—was there something else you were thinking of? `#[deriving(Encodable)]` should be able to read attributes on fields and provide the name accordingly.
And yes, you can't resume with this interface. You can implement traits for types outside the module they were defined in though, so a "resumable serialization" library could provide a new "ResumableEncoder" type if it wanted to.
I think of what you call "Encoder" as a "Visitor" (just in case you're looking for renaming input :)
So the function that you are generating at runtime is similar to a template function in C++, templated on the specific serializer (Encoder/Visitor/etc).
One thing that this approach does not currently support (which admittedly is probably not required for most users, and is probably not in line with the overall design of Rust) is the ability to resume. Suppose you are serializing to a socket and the socket is not write-ready. You would need to block until the socket is write-ready (or allocate a buffer to hold the serialized data). This interface doesn't provide a way of suspending the visit/encode and resuming it later.
This also doesn't seem to have a way of identifying the fields -- is this true? Like if you were trying to encode as JSON but wanted to know the name of each field?