Key differences of Alkahest from other popular serialization crates is zero-overhead serialization and zero-copy lazy deserialization.

The current design of the Read trait is nonoptimal as it requires that the buffer passed to its various methods be pre-initialized even though the contents will be immediately overwritten. This RFC proposes an interface to allow implementors and consumers of Read types to robustly and soundly work with uninitialized buffers.

In computer science, a red–black tree is a kind of self-balancing binary search tree. Each node stores an extra bit representing "color" ("red" or "black"), used to ensure that the tree remains balanced during insertions and deletions