I like the Go style better. I probably will not ever care about more than one or two encodings and being explicit is an upside in that regard. I do however really care about compile times. If performance really matters, I would not go for a generic serialization approach in the first place.
Apples and oranges. Go doesn't care about release or dev builds. Nothing about it applies here.
Rust needs specific toolchain improvements to cache partial compilations for reuse. sccache can cache some results, but it's not a comprehensive solution.
What specific proposal would replace serde? I'd like to know.
