cargo-inspect 0.2.0

This extends Cargo to allow you to desugar your Rust code and see what happens behind the curtains.
Documentation

cargo inspect

What is Rust doing behind the scenes?

There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. -- Albert Einstein

Installation

You need Rust nightly and rustfmt to get started.
You can install those via rustup:

rustup install nightly
rustup component add rustfmt-preview

All set? Let's get cracking!

cargo install cargo-inspect

Usage

Call it on any Rust file:

cargo inspect main.rs

Configuration

USAGE:
    cargo inspect [OPTIONS] <INPUT_FILE>

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
        --theme <theme>          Theme for syntax highlighting. See syntex documentation for options [default: base16-
                                 ocean.dark]
        --unpretty <unpretty>    rustc "unpretty" parameters [default: hir]

ARGS:
    <INPUT_FILE>    Input file

Background

Rust allows for a lot of syntactic sugar, that makes it a pleasure to write. It is sometimes hard, however, to look behind the curtain and see what the compiler is really doing with our code.

To quote @tshepang, "It is good to know what these conveniences are, to avoid being mystified by what's going on under the hood... the less magical thinking we have of the world, the better."

  • lifetime elisions
  • type inference
  • syntactic sugar
  • implicit dereferencing
  • type coercions
  • hidden code (e.g. the prelude)

I was always interested in how programming languages work in the background, how my code was unrolled to the compiler backend easier to maintain.

The goal is to make the compiler more approachable for mere-mortals.
Mystery! Exploration! Discovery!

Code Examples

If-let gets desugared into match

Consider the following code snippet:

fn main() {
    if let Some(x) = Some(1) {
        // Do something with x
    }
}

When you compile it, the first thing Rust does is desugar it. To see what the code looks like after this step, run

cargo inspect examples/if_let.rs

This produces the following output:

#[prelude_import]
use std::prelude::v1::*;
#[macro_use]
extern crate std;
fn main() {
    match Some(1) {
        Some(x) => {
            // Do something with x
        }
        _ => (),
    }
}

You can see that the if let was desugared into a match statement.

More examples

Please find more examples in the examples folder. You can also contribute more.

The Magic Sauce

The best things in the world are assembled from simple building blocks. This tool stands on the shoulders of giants. To work its magic, it runs the following commands:

  1. rustc -Zinspect=hir, for retrieving the HIR.
  2. rustfmt, for formatting the output.
  3. syntect, for syntax-highlighting.

Contributing

This is a young project, which has downsides and upsides.

  • Everything is in flux and things can break at any time. 😫
  • There's plenty of opportunity to shape and form the project. 😊

Thus, become a contributor today!

Known issues

As of now, this is a very fragile tool. If it fails, it might will produce horrible error messages.
You have been warned.

License

Licensed under either of

at your option.