Feature Request: automatic serialization / deserialization of S7 classes

[natemcintosh]

The general idea

Something similar to go's json.Marshall() and json.Unmarshall(), which allow (mostly) automatic conversion to and from JSON.

Use cases

• Configuration objects (my use case). You have a model that is complex enough to require a number of input parameters, some of them nested. Maybe you started with a list, but it's getting hard to keep track of all necessary fields, so you move to a class. Would be extremely handy to be able to read/write configurations directly to/from files (JSON, YAML, TOML, etc.)
• Accepting structured data from a web API directly into a class.
• Many non-web systems produce structured data, and it would be very convenient to be able to ingest their data directly into a class.

Issues with this suggestion

• Seems like a minefield of edge cases
• Lots of hard choices on how opinionated should such a system should be:
  • automatic type conversion, e.g. should it automatically convert a string to a date?
  • nested cases, e.g. how do you manage an Address class inside a Person class.
  • case matching, e.g. called address in JSON, but your property/class name is Address

Feel free to say "won't do" and close; I'm aware this is a big ask 😅.