scylladb / scylladb/python-rs-driver
Add custom serialization
Nobody has claimed this yet.
- Dominant language
- Rust
- Stars
- 6
- Forks
- 7
- Avg merge
- 5d 13h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 9
Description
Background: several old-driver tests deliberately send malformed/invalid wire data to verify the
server rejects it correctly — something Python's own type system won't let you construct normally (a
str can't hold invalid UTF-8, an int has no "empty" representation). The old driver gets around this
because its serializers are plain Python classes/functions that tests can monkeypatch:
Proposal: expose a way to plug in a custom Python serializer, invoked instead of the built-in one for
a given value/type.
Needs evaluation — implementation approach, not just API shape:
- How serialization is actually exposed to Python — the naive approach is a
serialize()method on a
user's class that returns rawbytes, letting the value "know how to serialize itself." But prior
benchmarking here showed that exposing a Rust-backed writer structure (e.g. something like a
CellWriterobject the user writes into, rather than building abytesobject in pure Python and
handing it back) is roughly 2x faster. We need to evaluate whether to:- keep it simple (
serialize() -> bytes, slower, easiest to implement/use), or - build a proper writer-object API (faster, more implementation work, better long-term default) — and
whether that's worth it.
- keep it simple (
- GIL-crossing cost: any custom serializer means calling back into Python from inside the Rust
serialization path — this should probably be an explicit opt-in per value/statement, not something
that touches the default hot path.
Contributor guide
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First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by reading the existing Rust serialization path and the old-driver serializer classes described in the issue. Compare the proposed Python bytes callback with a Rust-backed writer such as CellWriter, including GIL-crossing costs and opt-in scope. Done means selecting and documenting an implementation approach rather than only defining an API shape.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- python, rust
- Domain
- database
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Active
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 30/100