Convert a struct to byte array and back in rust

Question

I'm writing a program in Rust that involves sending data through a TCP Connection. I cannot figure out the way to convert a struct into a byte array and back. Other solutions have only managed to convert it into u8, but as I'm new-ish to Rust (only 3 months) I cannot figure it out. I hope you guys could give a way to do it.

Answer 1

You can use bincode to transform structs into bytes and vice versa. It is built on top of the serde framework:

use serde::{Serialize, Deserialize};

#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)]
struct Entity {
    x: f32,
    y: f32,
}

fn main() {
    let entity = Entity { x: 1.5, y: 1.5 };
    let encoded: Vec<u8> = bincode::serialize(&entity).unwrap();
    let decoded: Entity = bincode::deserialize(&encoded[..]).unwrap();
}