With Serde 1.0 hot off the presses the Library Team has decided to officially deprecate the rustc-serialize crate. The crate itself has moved to the rust-lang-deprecated organization and the documentation has been updated to reflect the fact that it is now deprecated.

As the fourth most downloaded dependency on crates.io we realize that this may affect quite a few crates! It’s highly recommended to migrate to Serde which has a huge number of improvements over rustc-serialize, including (but not limited to):

Deserializing maps and such where the structure is not known ahead of time

Zero-copy deserialization

Insanely fast speed

Plenty of bugs fixed (especially in the JSON implementation)

Vastly more flexible and customizable #[derive] syntax

syntax A large, enthusiastic, growing community

At this time the library team will no longer be looking to merge and/or fix feature requests in the rustc-serialize crate. We will continue for the time being to merge bug fixes while crates continue to migrate to serde, but it’s recommended to move to serde soon!

If you have any questions please feel free to ask here!