Procedural Macros (and custom derive) - The Rust Programming Language

# Procedural Macros (and custom Derive)

As you've seen throughout the rest of the book, Rust provides a mechanism called "derive" that lets you implement traits easily. For example,

    # #![allow(unused_variables)]
    #fn main() {
    #[derive(Debug)]
    struct Point {
        x: i32,
        y: i32,
    }
    #}

is a lot simpler than

    # #![allow(unused_variables)]
    #fn main() {
    struct Point {
        x: i32,
        y: i32,
    }

    use std::fmt;

    impl fmt::Debug for Point {
        fn fmt(&self, f: &mut fmt::Formatter) -> fmt::Result {
            write!(f, "Point {{ x: {}, y: {} }}", self.x, self.y)
        }
    }
    #}

Rust includes several traits that you can derive, but it also lets you define your own. We can accomplish this task through a feature of Rust called "procedural macros." Eventually, procedural macros will allow for all sorts of advanced metaprogramming in Rust, but today, they're only for custom derive.

Let's build a very simple trait, and derive it with custom derive.

## Hello World

So the first thing we need to do is start a new crate for our project.

    $ cargo new --bin hello-world

All we want is to be able to call `hello_world()` on a derived type. Something like this:

    #[derive(HelloWorld)]
    struct Pancakes;

    fn main() {
        Pancakes::hello_world();
    }

With some kind of nice output, like `Hello, World! My name is Pancakes.`.

Let's go ahead and write up what we think our macro will look like from a user perspective. In `src/main.rs` we write:

    #[macro_use]
    extern crate hello_world_derive;

    trait HelloWorld {
        fn hello_world();
    }

    #[derive(HelloWorld)]
    struct FrenchToast;

    #[derive(HelloWorld)]
    struct Waffles;

    fn main() {
        FrenchToast::hello_world();
        Waffles::hello_world();
    }

Great. So now we just need to actually write the procedural macro. At the moment, procedural macros need to be in their own crate. Eventually, this restriction may be lifted, but for now, it's required. As such, there's a convention; for a crate named `foo`, a custom derive procedural macro is called `foo-derive`. Let's start a new crate called `hello-world-derive` inside our `hello-world` project.

    $ cargo new hello-world-derive

To make sure that our `hello-world` crate is able to find this new crate we've created, we'll add it to our toml:

    [dependencies]
    hello-world-derive = { path = "hello-world-derive" }

As for the source of our `hello-world-derive` crate, here's an example:

    extern crate proc_macro;
    extern crate syn;
    #[macro_use]
    extern crate quote;

    use proc_macro::TokenStream;

    #[proc_macro_derive(HelloWorld)]
    pub fn hello_world(input: TokenStream) -> TokenStream {
        // Construct a string representation of the type definition
        let s = input.to_string();

        // Parse the string representation
        let ast = syn::parse_derive_input(&s).unwrap();

        // Build the impl
        let gen = impl_hello_world(&ast);

        // Return the generated impl
        gen.parse().unwrap()
    }

So there is a lot going on here. We have introduced two new crates: `syn` and `quote`. As you may have noticed, `input: TokenSteam` is immediately converted to a `String`. This `String` is a string representation of the Rust code for which we are deriving `HelloWorld`. At the moment, the only thing you can do with a `TokenStream` is convert it to a string. A richer API will exist in the future.

So what we really need is to be able to parse Rust code into something usable. This is where `syn` comes to play. `syn` is a crate for parsing Rust code. The other crate we've introduced is `quote`. It's essentially the dual of `syn` as it will make generating Rust code really easy. We could write this stuff on our own, but it's much simpler to use these libraries. Writing a full parser for Rust code is no simple task.

The comments seem to give us a pretty good idea of our overall strategy. We are going to take a `String` of the Rust code for the type we are deriving, parse it using `syn`, construct the implementation of `hello_world` (using `quote`), then pass it back to Rust compiler.

One last note: you'll see some `unwrap()`s there. If you want to provide an error for a procedural macro, then you should `panic!` with the error message. In this case, we're keeping it as simple as possible.

Great, so let's write `impl_hello_world(&ast)`.

    fn impl_hello_world(ast: &syn::DeriveInput) -> quote::Tokens {
        let name = &ast.ident;
        quote! {
            impl HelloWorld for #name {
                fn hello_world() {
                    println!("Hello, World! My name is {}", stringify!(#name));
                }
            }
        }
    }

So this is where quotes comes in. The `ast` argument is a struct that gives us a representation of our type (which can be either a `struct` or an `enum`). Check out the docs, there is some useful information there. We are able to get the name of the type using `ast.ident`. The `quote!` macro lets us write up the Rust code that we wish to return and convert it into `Tokens`. `quote!` lets us use some really cool templating mechanics; we simply write `#name` and `quote!` will replace it with the variable named `name`. You can even do some repetition similar to regular macros work. You should check out the docs for a good introduction.

So I think that's it. Oh, well, we do need to add dependencies for `syn` and `quote` in the `cargo.toml` for `hello-world-derive`.

    [dependencies]
    syn = "0.11.11"
    quote = "0.3.15"

That should be it. Let's try to compile `hello-world`.

    error: the `#[proc_macro_derive]` attribute is only usable with crates of the `proc-macro` crate type
     --> hello-world-derive/src/lib.rs:8:3
      |
    8 | #[proc_macro_derive(HelloWorld)]
      |   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Oh, so it appears that we need to declare that our `hello-world-derive` crate is a `proc-macro` crate type. How do we do this? Like this:

    [lib]
    proc-macro = true

Ok so now, let's compile `hello-world`. Executing `cargo run` now yields:

    Hello, World! My name is FrenchToast
    Hello, World! My name is Waffles

We've done it!

## Custom Attributes

In some cases it might make sense to allow users some kind of configuration. For example, the user might want to overwrite the name that is printed in the `hello_world()` method.

This can be achieved with custom attributes:

    #[derive(HelloWorld)]
    #[HelloWorldName = "the best Pancakes"]
    struct Pancakes;

    fn main() {
        Pancakes::hello_world();
    }

If we try to compile this though, the compiler will respond with an error:

    error: The attribute `HelloWorldName` is currently unknown to the compiler and may have meaning added to it in the future (see issue #29642)

The compiler needs to know that we're handling this attribute and to not respond with an error. This is done in the `hello-world-derive` crate by adding `attributes` to the `proc_macro_derive` attribute:

    #[proc_macro_derive(HelloWorld, attributes(HelloWorldName))]
    pub fn hello_world(input: TokenStream) -> TokenStream

Multiple attributes can be specified that way.

## Raising Errors

Let's assume that we do not want to accept enums as input to our custom derive method.

This condition can be easily checked with the help of `syn`. But how do we tell the user, that we do not accept enums? The idiomatic way to report errors in procedural macros is to panic:

    fn impl_hello_world(ast: &syn::DeriveInput) -> quote::Tokens {
        let name = &ast.ident;
        // Check if derive(HelloWorld) was specified for a struct
        if let syn::Body::Struct(_) = ast.body {
            // Yes, this is a struct
            quote! {
                impl HelloWorld for #name {
                    fn hello_world() {
                        println!("Hello, World! My name is {}", stringify!(#name));
                    }
                }
            }
        } else {
            //Nope. This is an Enum. We cannot handle these!
           panic!("#[derive(HelloWorld)] is only defined for structs, not for enums!");
        }
    }

If a user now tries to derive `HelloWorld` from an enum they will be greeted with following, hopefully helpful, error:

    error: custom derive attribute panicked
      --> src/main.rs
       |
       | #[derive(HelloWorld)]
       |          ^^^^^^^^^^
       |
       = help: message: #[derive(HelloWorld)] is only defined for structs, not for enums!