Approximately everything, but on its own nothing. Serde provides the framework and macros/annotations, serde_json is the "backend" implementing the actual json serialization.
Sure, it could be named serde_framwork and serde_json, but I think serde and serde_json isn't that bad either.
I really love Serde, but one consequence of splitting out the formats into different libraries is that different formats can be of substantially different levels of quality. My impression is that JSON support is best-of-class, but I have no idea about the others.
For example, I've been looking at the CBOR library for Serde [1], and it's not obvious whether the library is full-featured, robust, actively supported, etc. Same goes for many of the other Serde formats. At the moment I'm likely to just choose JSON for new projects since I don't want to build on top of something that isn't known to be solid, but it would be really nice to be able to use binary formats for what I want to do.
Now that Serde is 1.0 it would be nice to do a push on the individual formats so that users coming in can tell what's active and well-supported vs a (possibly inactive) community contribution.
The language is just JSON with functions. It's actually so nice to write configurations in that I wish it was more easier to use as a standalone thing.
That's a pretty cool project. But I wonder what to do with it. If I understand correctly, it transforms the JSON into a format that's easier to parse yourself.
Personally, I use jq and it has a built-in query language of some sorts.
I've used it for a few small tools and love it. I started out just writing schemas for testing the format of JSON generated by tools or pulled from an API, but you can do so much more... like using it to generate documentation or even [create forms](https://github.com/joshfire/jsonform).
Sure, it could be named serde_framwork and serde_json, but I think serde and serde_json isn't that bad either.
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