Serialization of messages

[trevg22]

Was there a specific design choice to not add serde serialize and deserialize trait to messages? This would be an optional feature to enable of course. Would a PR on this accepted? For my use case I am needing to send my parsed messages over the net.

[squidpickles]

Hi @trevg22, no reason in particular. I suppose I got hung up on AIS being bit-oriented, couldn't think of a meaningful way to represent all of the data that was better than AIS itself, so never explored further. I could see it being useful, so I'm not opposed to it.

If this is something you'd like to work on, it'd be most welcome, though I am a tiny bit concerned about code readability with the proliferation of feature flags. Serde at least has no-std and alloc support (see https://serde.rs/no-std.html), so that's nice, though I think it makes this a moderately difficult change.

Happy to answer any questions you might have, and I could probably have a look at a work in progress if you run into any difficulties; I'm not using this crate actively right now, but would like to put in some support time if it can help folks.