Comment by woah

I've seen Go codebases where serialization was used as a way to generics... ugly.

The generic code would take a string of the serialized struct, which could be passed through (the code was operating on an outer structure) then be deserialized at the other end, preserving the type information. Maybe it could have been handled by some kind of typecasting plus an enum containing the name of the type (don't remember the specifics of Go right now), but the devs had halfway convinced themselves that the serialization served another purpose.