I have a Cargo project, and I want to write a binary that will take in a type name and a YAML string, and attempt to deserialize the YAML to the type, and report whether deserializing succeeded. My use case is that there is some YAML in non-Rust documentation, and I'd like to automatically test that it is in the correct format.
I know that I can do this by using brute force if or match statements, etc. I just wanted to make sure I didn't re-invent something that already existed.
I'm not 100% sure, but if you are asking whether there is runtime reflection to reify a type based on its name, then no, there's no such functionality in the language.
You might be able to get somewhere with the typetag crate, but I'm not familiar enough with it to propose a concrete solution.
Full runtime reflection would probably be more powerful than I need; I was more looking for something that would help me build the scaffolding to branch out. I assume I could do this with a macro, but I'm not great with those yet.
Intriguing! I have a feeling it might not work in this case since I'd have to re-work the YAML to fit the tag style; but I'll take a closer look.
If you are satisfied with a macro, then that's easy, except you can only deserialize into a predefined list of types. Playground.
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