Is it possible to tell if a field is a certain type or implements a certain method in a procedural macro?
No, it is not.
Macros operate on the abstract syntax tree (AST) of the Rust code. This means that you basically just get the characters that the user typed in.
If user code has something like type Foo = Option<Result<i32, MyError>>
, and you process some code that uses Foo
, the macro will not know that it's "really" an Option
.
Even if it did know the type, knowing what methods are available would be even harder. Future crates can create traits which add methods to existing types. At the point in time that the procedural macro is running, these crates may not have even been compiled yet.
I am looking at creating another trait/member function that I just have to create for all primitives and create a procedural macro for larger fields such as structs.
This is the correct solution. If you look at any existing well-used procedural macro, that's exactly what it does. This allows the compiler to do what the compiler is intended to do.
This is also way better for maintainability — now these primitive implementations live in a standard Rust file, as opposed to embedded inside of a macro. Much easier to read and debug.
Your crate will have something like this:
// No real design put into this trait
trait ToBytes {
fn encode(&self, buf: &mut Vec<u8>);
}
impl ToBytes for str {
fn encode(&self, buf: &mut Vec<u8>) {
buf.extend(self.as_bytes())
}
}
// Other base implementations
And your procedural macro will implement this in the straightforward way:
#[derive(ToBytes)]
struct Foo {
a: A,
b: B,
}
becomes
impl ToBytes for Foo {
fn encode(&self, buf: &mut Vec<u8>) {
ToBytes::encode(&self.a, buf);
ToBytes::encode(&self.b, buf);
}
}
As a concrete example, Serde does the same thing, with multiple ways of serializing to and from binary data: