Does bincode guarantee a 1:1 relationship between encodings and values?

[WesleyAC]

Does bincode guarantee a 1:1 relationship between encodings and values?

[VictorKoenders]

Bincode tries to achieve this but like you mentioned cases like NaN floating point deserialization could violate this assumption. Specifically we use a lot of from_le_bytes and from_be_bytes calls which could result in situations where the encoded value is different than the in-memory value.

That being said, I think in reality all values from the standard library will be a 1:1 mapping.

The bigger thing where this guarantee could break is when 3rd parties implement bincode for their types. At this point they could implement it any way they want, even using a randomizer to populate the data.

[WesleyAC]

Hmm, it seems like this isn't guaranteed for built in types, given that HashMap is serialized in a arbitrary order :/

I think for people who want this property Borsh or BCS would be a better choice.

See #230 for prior discussion.

[stale]

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