Procedural Macros 101
summary
Shows how to view and reason about real expanded Rust code with cargo expand and IDE expansion, then walks through building a proc-macro crate that parses token streams with syn and quote to generate trait impls and constructors. Demonstrates deriving Clone-style impls, a derive constructor that creates new(...) from struct fields, and HTML-like function macros that accept non-Rust tokens. Covers spans for accurate errors and testing with trybuild, plus maintenance and hygiene pitfalls.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:48Procedural macros and metaprogramming
- 3:13Three types of macros
- 4:39Derive macros with clone
- 6:01Why use Rust macros
- 7:04Custom syntax extension
- 8:11Token stream manipulation
- 9:54Token streams and spans
- 11:20Write your first macro
- 12:24Derive macro to print AST
- 14:31Implementing trait with derive
- 15:53Code from struct fields
- 17:19Automatic constructor macro
- 20:28Macro writing considerations
- 21:30Learning resources
- 23:17Closing
