zoet 0.1.1

Adds #[zoet] macro to reduce boilerplate when implementing common traits.

If you are sick of writing impl Deref for Bar etc. and it didn't compile because you confused it with AsRef, had a hard-to-debug problem because you implemented PartialOrd and mistakenly thought that deriving Ord would do the sane thing, and/or you would rather just implement these core traits as regular methods in your impl Bar like lesser languages, this crate is for you!

Unfortunately, it uses nightly features, so if you need to use the stable compiler, you are going to have to wait in anticipation for the features to stablilise before you can use it.

It is superficially similar to the various derive macros such as derive_more, except that rather than generating traits based on the contents of a struct, it generates them based on individual functions/methods. An example works better than a textual description ever would:

use zoet::zoet;

#[derive(Clone, Copy, Debug, PartialEq)]
struct Length(usize);
#[zoet]
impl Length {
    #[zoet(Default)]          // generates `impl Default for Length`
    pub fn new() -> Self { Self(0) }

    #[zoet(From)]             // generates `From<usize> for Length`
    fn from_usize(value: usize) -> Self { Self(value) }

    #[zoet(From)]             // generates `From<Length> for usize`
    fn to_usize(self) -> usize { self.0 }

    #[zoet(AsRef, Borrow, Deref)] // generates all of those
    fn as_usize(&self) -> &usize { &self.0 }

    #[zoet(Add, AddAssign)]   // generates `impl Add for Length` and `impl AddAssign for Length`
    fn add_assign(&mut self, rhs: Self) { self.0 += rhs.0; }

    #[zoet(Ord, PartialOrd)]  // you get the idea by now
    fn ord(&self, other: &Self) { self.0.cmp(&other.0) }
}

let mut v = Length::default();
v += Length(1);
assert_eq!(v + Length(2), Length(3));
v += Length(4);
assert_eq!(v, Length(5));
assert_eq!(Length::from(v), Length(5));

Due to limitations in macro processing, you must add #[zoet] to your struct's impl block so that the self type of its methods can be determined. This is obviously not necessary (or possible) for free functions as they don't have a self type.

Transformations for most traits in the standard library are provided. Omitted are those which are just marker traits (there's no code to generate), those which require multiple functions, and some which don't quite seem worth it. The current list is as follows:

• core::borrow: Borrow, BorrowMut.
• std::borrow: ToOwned.
• core::clone: Clone.
• core::cmp: Ord, PartialEq, PartialOrd.
• core::convert: AsMut, AsRef, From, Into, TryFrom, TryInto.
• core::default: Default.
• core::fmt: Debug, Display, Write (only the write_str method).
• core::iterator: FromIterator, Iterator (only the next method).
• core::ops: Deref, DerefMut, Drop, Index, IndexMut, plus all arithmetic and bit ops and assignment variants such as Add and AddAssign.
• core::str: FromStr.
• std::string: ToString.

These traits normally just include the trait boilerplate and forward the arguments to your method, however there are a couple of special cases which reduce boilerplate further:

• PartialOrd can also be applied to an Ord-shaped function, in which case it wraps the result with Some() to make it fit. This allows you to do #zoet[(Ord, PartialOrd)] to implement both with the same function and avoid order-related bugs.
• Add etc. can be applied to an AddAssign-shaped function, in which case it generates a trivial implementation which mutates its mut self and returns it.

However, while this macro makes it easy to stamp out loads of core traits, don't go crazy but consider each trait you add and whether there is a more suitable macro to do the job. The example above generates Default based on new(), but since that function returns 0 which is the default value anyway, it'd be better to #derive(Default) and implement new() in terms of that. Similarly, its Add and AddAssign trait implementations just delegating to its field's Add and AddAssign traits, and the can be completely eliminated by using derive_more and deriving Add and AddAssign on the struct. And if your struct doesn't satisfy Borrow's invariants, you shouldn't unthinkingly do #[zoet(AsRef, Borrow, Deref)].

You are also reminded that cargo-expand exists, and can be used to inspect the expanded text.