Analyzing Rust's Coherence and Orphan Rules: Ecosystem Development Challenges and Proposed Solutions

The Rust ecosystem has a fundamental problem with how it's developing.

Foundational crates such as serde define foundational traits such as Serialize, and then every crate in the ecosystem needs to implement the Serialize traits for their own types.

If a crate doesn't implement serde's traits for its types then those types can't be used with serde as downstream crates cannot implement serde's traits for another crate's types.

Coherence and the orphan rules are a frequent source of complaints about Rust, and a common topic of language proposals.