[whitequark_]

At the time when I started working on smoltcp, there were a few Rust libraries for working with TCP/IP on the wire level, and they heavily used metaprogramming. Unfortunately, the task of implementing a generic binary protocol serializer/deserializer that can handle TCP/IP is not small, and as far as I could tell, it overtook implementing anything beyond that.

So I made the decision to do the simplest possible thing: write the packet serializers/deserializers entirely by hand. It took very little time and adding any new features was easy and predictable. I believe it was the right decision as it allowed me to focus on the hard parts of a TCP/IP stack.

[adwn]

Thank you for answering. That sounds sensible, I guess.