It's been mentioned in the post, but it's a big deal, so for emphasis: serde is much nicer to use on nightly than stable, even though it will work on stable. This has been one of the biggest reasons people aren't on stable Rust. The tooling needed to get it working on stable with the same ergonomics as nightly is slated for Rust 1.15. It's not 100% for sure, but 99.99%.<p>This will also help crates like Diesel.
There's also nom (<a href="https://github.com/Geal/nom" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Geal/nom</a>) which is similar to Parsec and more designed for parsing text formats but used for binary formats too.
And it's only for nightly (see "feature") and it means it's can be used in reliable code. Talks about stabilizing of this feature are endless.