rust-lang/rust — pull request #17595 by danburkert (2014-09-27 21:38:42+00:00)
Title: libserialize: tuple-arity should be provided to `Decoder::read_tuple`

Currently `Decoder` implementations are not provided the tuple arity as
a parameter to `read_tuple`. This forces all encoder/decoder combos to
serialize the arity along with the elements. Tuple-arity is always known
statically at the decode site, because it is part of the type of the
tuple, so it could instead be provided as an argument to `read_tuple`,
as it is to `read_struct`.

The upside to this is that serialized tuples could become smaller in
encoder/decoder implementations which choose not to serialize type
(arity) information. For example, @TyOverby's
[binary-encode](https://github.com/TyOverby/binary-encode) format is
currently forced to serialize the tuple-arity along with every tuple,
despite the information being statically known at the decode site.

A downside to this change is that the tuple-arity of serialized tuples
can no longer be automatically checked during deserialization. However,
for formats which do serialize the tuple-arity, either explicitly (rbml)
or implicitly (json), this check can be added to the `read_tuple` method.

The signature of `Deserialize::read_tuple` and
`Deserialize::read_tuple_struct` are changed, and thus binary
backwards-compatibility is broken. This change does *not* force
serialization formats to change, and thus does not break decoding values
serialized prior to this change.

[breaking-change]