Should serializers be a struct?

[jwoertink]

In my main app, we've made all of our serializers structs; however, since we're currently using GraphQL, they're not quite the same as the default Lucky serializer

lucky/src/lucky/serializer.cr

Line 3 in 5607fe6

abstract class Lucky::Serializer

We've had these as a struct for at least 2 years with no issues (that I'm aware of). My thought is that a serializer is basically read-only. There's not really a time I can think of where you would want to alter the structure and pass it around all over the place. This may make a big difference in larger APIs. Does anyone have any thoughts on for or against? This would obviously be a fairly large breaking change that couldn't be backwards compatible.

[akadusei]

I've always used structs for serializers too, but I think it should be a module. This lets the end developer decide what's best for their use case:

module Lucky::Serializer
  abstract def render

  def to_json(io)
    render.to_json(io)
  end
end

Used as a class:

abstract class BaseSerializer
  include Lucky::Serializer
end

Used as a struct:

abstract struct BaseSerializer
  include Lucky::Serializer
end

[jwoertink]

That's genius! 😄 Definitely a better way to go.