> serde rust

That does look a lot cleaner. I was just grumbling about this in golang yesterday (yaml, not json, but effectively the same problem).

I work in go every day and generally enjoy it.

The lack of tagged unions of some sort in go makes things like polymorphic json difficult to handle. It's possible, but requires a ton of overhead. Rust with enums mixed with serde makes this trivial. Insanely trivial.