Tag: macros

We, the IntelliJ Rust plugin team, are now partially enabling support for procedural macros, specifically enabling function-like and derive procedural macro expansion by default while hiding support for attribute procedural macros behind the org.rust.macros.proc.attr experimental feature flag. While we mostly refer to the IntelliJ Rust plugin here, the same things apply to your favorite editor powered by rust-analyzer. In fact, we are very similar regarding macro support. Even more importantly, we face the same problems.

Let’s discuss several fundamental ideas regarding macros and their support in IDEs, including main ideas and approaches, good and bad parts, implementation details, and problems.

Macros in Rust tend to have a reputation for being complex and magical, the likes which only seasoned wizards like @dtolnay can hope to understand, let alone master.

Rust’s declarative macros provide a mechanism for pattern matching on arbitrary syntax to generate valid Rust code at compile time. I use them all the time for simple search/replace style operations like generating tests that have a lot of boilerplate, or straightforward trait implementations for a large number of types.

Unfortunately once you need to do more than these trivial macros, the difficulty tends to go through the roof…

I recently encountered a situation at work where a non-trivial technical problem could be solved by writing an equally non-trivial macro. There are a number of tricks and techniques I employed along the way that helped keep the code manageable and easy to implement, so I thought I’d help the next adventurer by writing them down.

This is the first post on my new series "practical rust bites" that shows very tiny pieces of rust, taken out of practical real projects. So this article will be super short, easy to follow and hopefully helpful to find your way into the rust eco system.

I found some spare time this past week and sat down with a nice brew and Jon Gjengset's excellent Crust of Rust video on declarative macros. For the longest time, macros have felt 'that last part of Rust that I haven't gotten around to checking out'. I've had a vague notion of what they are, but have never quite gotten to exploring them. However, Gjengset's video served as a perfect introduction to declarative macros, and was just enough to get me started.

One day I wanted to quickly print for how long certain pieces of code run without setting up the whole profiling business. I used std::time::Instant for that, it's nice and easy and gives access to monotonic clock on your OS. Then I thought that it would be convenient to have a macro time_it which I can use to wrap any statement, block of code or even many statements and measure their timings. I had in mind something like context managers in Python.

It's never a bad idea to take a stroll through the source code for Rust's standard library. There's a lot to see, including high-performance data structures, meticulously-designed system interfaces, and rock-solid concurrency primitives. Personally, I've learned a lot just from studying (and using) the elegant APIs provided by the Result and Option types.

But, for a Rust developer, the standard library serves another vital purpose: it is chock full of clever ideas for how to manage various ergonomics issues you'll encounter initially when writing Rust. Indeed, it is a particularly valuable source of such techniques because, given the language's young age, the solution to every problem isn't exactly plastered all over Stack Overflow quite yet.