Serde Support for Core Structures

[ivanlele]

Hi team,

I'm wondering if there are plans to add serde support or other serialization methods for core structures such as ValueVec, Circuit, etc.

Current Issue:
Currently, when you want to compile a circuit separately and use it later, you need to populate the witness and save it together with only the constraints, not the entire circuit (as shown in your examples here.

Problem:
If you want to create a witness separately from the circuit compilation scope, you may not be able to access WitnessFiller because it's derived from Circuit, which is not serializable and cannot be saved.

Proposed Solution:
I cloned this project and added serde support for all the mentioned structures. This allows me to run circuit compilation and witness population separately. At first glance, there are no issues - proofs generate correctly.

Question:
Would the team be open to adding serde support for these structures?

Thanks!

[jadnohra]

Hi @ivanlele,

Being able to run circuit compilation and witness population separately is useful. We will look into the issue and provide a solution (serde is an option, though we use our bespoke binary serialization for the witness and the constraint system).

Nevertheless, you can submit your changes as a DRAFT PR, We'd be happy to take a look.