In tokio land, you'd implement this with a Decoder layered on top of a raw byte stream (at the lowest level, this is always the type of the stream). The decoder would turn the bytes into whatever higher level type you want, and consumers would work off streams that are decoded underneath. This is all type-safe and uses generics extensively, so gets the optimization/codegen benefits of that. You can then also take a decoded stream/sink and split it into a read and write halves, if you want to operate over the duplex separately. Perhaps you can look at tokio/futures and see if you like it better.
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