Borsh

https://crates.io/crates/borsh

Borsh (short for Binary Object Representation Serializer for Hashing) is a deterministic, binary serialization format often used in Rust (and other languages) to encode and decode data in a consistent, unambiguous way

It was originally developed by the NEAR Protocol team for use in smart contracts, but you can use it in any Rust project that needs a fast, predictable serialization layer.

cargo add borsh

Update Cargo.toml

[dependencies]
borsh = { version = "1.5", features = ["derive"]}

Try to serialize and deserialize a struct

use borsh::{BorshSerialize, BorshDeserialize};

#[derive(BorshSerialize, BorshDeserialize, Debug, PartialEq)]
struct MyStruct {
    id: u64,
    data: String,
    v: Vec<u32>
}

fn main() {
    let original = MyStruct {
        id: 42,
        data: "Hello, Borsh!".into(),
        v: vec![1, 2, 3]
    };

    let mut buffer: Vec<u8> = Vec::new();

    original.serialize(&mut buffer).unwrap();

    // Deserialize
    let deserialized = MyStruct::try_from_slice(&mut buffer).unwrap();

    assert_eq!(original, deserialized);
    println!("Successfully serialized and deserialized: {:?}", deserialized);
}

Assignment -

Write the same code in JS, log the values and confirm they are indeed the sam
Create a function called increment and decrement that reads bytes from a file (a.bin), update the value of a Counter variable inside and re-write it to the file