bytemuck

bytemuck provides safe casting between plain-data types (Pod, Zeroable) in Rust. It's widely used in the Solana and wgpu ecosystems for GPU buffer management and on-chain data layout.

Current status

As of 2026, zerocopy 0.8 is the recommended alternative for new code. zerocopy offers formally verified safety (Kani proofs), enum support, DST handling, UnsafeCell/atomics awareness, and built-in byte-order types — features bytemuck lacks. However, bytemuck's simpler Pod-based API and deep ecosystem integration mean migration of existing code isn't urgent.