macrokata

MacroKata

Welcome to MacroKata, a set of exercises which you can use to learn how to write macros in Rust. When completing each task, there are three goals:

• Get your code to compile without warnings or errors.
• Get your code to “work correctly” (i.e. produce the same output)
• Importantly, generate the same code as what the sample solution does.

You should complete the kata in order, as they increase in difficulty, and depend on previous kata.

This set of exercises is written for people who have already spent some time programming in Rust. Before completing this, work through a Rust tutorial and build some small programs yourself.

Getting Started

Clone this repository:

$ git clone https://www.github.com/tfpk/macrokata/

You will also need to install the Rust “nightly” toolchain, so that we can show expanded macros:

$ rustup toolchain install nightly

Next, install cargo-expand:

$ cargo install cargo-expand

Build the main binary provided with this repo:

$ cargo build --bin macrokata

You can find the first kata (my_first_macro) inside exercises/01_my_first_macro. Read the first chapter of the book and get started by editing the main.rs file.

To compare your expanded code to the “goal”, use the test subcommand:

$ cargo run -- test 01_my_first_macro

You can run your own code as follows:

$ cargo run --bin 01_my_first_macro

How To Learn About Procedural Macros

I was originally planning to expand macrokata into discussing procedural macros as well. As I was researching that, I found dtolnay’s superlative Proc Macro Workshop. Jon Gjengset’s video on proc-macros is also a phenomenal resource (despite its length).

I’ve put my attempt to write something like that on hold because I think the above is better in every way. Do file an issue if there’s something that we could do here to complement that workshop though.