Procedural macros in Rust allow developers to extend the language and automate code generation. They are often used to create custom derive
attributes or other annotations that modify or add to Rust's functionality.
In this challenge, you'll implement a procedural macro to derive a custom trait called Describe
. The Describe
trait should provide a method, describe
, that returns a string containing the name of the struct and its fields with their values. This macro should generate an implementation of the trait automatically when applied to a struct.
Your task is to create a procedural macro named derive_describe
that can be used to generate the Describe
trait implementation for any struct. The generated describe
method should return a string representation of the struct, including its name and all its fields with their respective values.
For example, applying the macro to a struct like:
Should generate a Describe
implementation such that:
The derive_describe
macro should:
Describe
trait implementation for the struct it is applied to.The describe
method should return a properly formatted string, including the struct name and fields with their values.
Procedural macros must be defined in a separate crate from the one where they are used. This is because procedural macros are compiled to a shared library that is loaded by the Rust compiler at compile time. The shared library must be compiled before the crate that uses the macro.
In your Cargo.toml
, you should define a new crate for the procedural macro:
This is already done for this challenge, but it's important to understand the setup.
syn
crate to parse the input TokenStream
into an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST).quote
crate to generate Rust code as a TokenStream
.