For more brain flipping try looking into hardware description languages (Verilog) or proof assistants (Coq).

Not quite. Suppose instead of a single version of serde there’s now 46 versions like in https://crates.io/crates/parquet to be able to use instances derived in some other crate X you have to use the same version of serde. Now, how should a crate decide which versions of serde to support?

All 46 and all optional? Supporting that would be painful. Just the last one? crates.io is a cemetery full of dead crates, with this support strategy any handful of crates picked at random are not going to be serde-compatible with each other.

A better solution would be a better support for compile time reflection so serde doesn’t have to exist in its current state, but that’s got delayed (by big macro conspiracy :)

serde is maintained by dtolnay, he is not the original author.

It seems it was done to marginally improve serde_derive build times? And just on x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu?

Indeed. If you use nix instead of compiling in 8 seconds it fails to compile almost instantly.

Encrypted data don’t compress well.

Then there’s Haskell that would remove (well, used to at some point) your source code file if you made any errors: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/163

Thank you good bot.

If you want more of the same, about what was before ASCII and after it - there’s a great talk by Dylan Beattie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd5uJ7Nlvvo