Hi folks, I’m trying to find my way around R8 / ProGuard config. I’m just using a dummy test project...

# serialization

[Chris Fillmore]

Hi folks, I’m trying to find my way around R8 / ProGuard config. I’m just using a dummy test project with minifyEnabled true on the release build.

My question is, is it necessary to configure ProGuard for Kotlin serialization, if you always provide a serializer explicitly? So I mean, in every case I call it like this:

serializer.decodeFromString(MyData.serializer(), json)
// or
serializer.encodeToString(MyData.serializer(), myObj)

On observation, my program seems to work fine with obfuscation enabled, without any ProGuard configuration, if I am passing the serializer like this. This seems to contradict the docs:

The library works on Android, but, if you’re using ProGuard, you need to add rules to your <http://proguard-rules.pro|proguard-rules.pro> configuration to cover all classes that are serialized at runtime.

[Chris Fillmore]

Thanks for any help

[ephemient]

there's other reified functions that rely on reflection, such as

SerializersModule {
    contextual(serializer())
    polymorphic(Base::class) {
        subclass(Sub::class)
    }
}

but as long as you're not using those, you're safe even under r8

[Chris Fillmore]

Thanks for responding! That’s great news