04
Neopack is live

2026-03-04 · 333 words

Slowly emerges from the sixth sea of silence.

Hello! I’m back for the time being.

I started working on a handful of projects, and those have been taking up my blogging time. Sorry for the inconsistency.

I wanted to announce that I’ve published the first (and hopefully only) version of Neopack! Neopack is a very small library for quick and schema-agnostic tag-length-value serialization. It should be good for both IDL and RPC type workloads. Here’s a minimal “getting-started”-type example:

[dependencies]
neopack = { version = "1.2", features = ["derive"] }

use neopack::{Pack, Unpack};

#[derive(Pack, Unpack)]
struct Point { x: i32, y: i32 }

let bytes = Point { x: 1, y: 2 }.pack_to_vec().unwrap();
let point = Point::unpack_from_bytes(&bytes).unwrap();

Neopack is what I’d consider to be “done” software. There might be a few minor wrinkles to iron out, but I don’t expect anything major about the library, its API, or the wire format to change anytime soon.

If you’d like to take a look, here are the docs. It is very similar to serde (except it’s only about one kiloline of code) and has zero-copy deserialization:

• neopack on docs.rs. Core library, exposes derive feature.
• neopack-derive on docs.rs. Derive macros for the Pack and Unpack traits.

One limitation of neopack is that it’s no-std. So the crate doesn’t implement serialization for standard library types, like PathBuf. I considered going the serde route, with the fancy mod for custom serialize/deserialize, but in the name of simplicity I ask that you serialize these types yourself to bytes or a String, and to not include them in serialized structs. If I figure out a solution that makes everyone happy, I’ll do it!

That’s all! Thanks for reading.