February Meetup: Macros 1.1

[colin-kiegel]

Todo:

• Settle for a date: 2017-02-01?
• Send "Save the Date" info (with link to this ticket)
• Basic Agenda
• Final invitation (deadline 2017-01-17)
  • meetup
  • website
  • twitter
  • community calendar
  • reddit
  • rust-lang forum
  • rustplatz
• Prepare "Introduction to Macros 1.1" slides/examples

Invitation draft

Title: Hacking Macros 1.1 (Cologne / 2017-02-01)

Let's get together and hack on some brand new Rust macros, shall we? :-)

Join us on 2017-02-01, 19:15 CET in Cologne, Germany.

With Rust 1.15 scheduled for early February, the highly anticipated procedural
macros 1.1 (aka custom derives) are finally going to be stable.

Agenda

* A short introduction to macros 1.1
* Peer up (optional)
* Pick a project and start hacking(*)

(*) If you are unfamiliar with Rust itself or procedural macros in Rust, you
are welcome to start with a small toy project, work in a group, and ask fellow
Rustaceans for guidance!

As always, you can enjoy some drinks, meet nice people and discuss about Rust.

**[You can register here](https://www.meetup.com/RustCologne/events/236858848/)**.

We are looking forward to seeing you. :-)

Yours,
Jan-Erik, Pascal, Florian and Colin

—

The meetup will likely be held in German, we will however reevaluate this at the beginning
of the evening and may switch to English if needed.

Rust News

• Rust Language Server Alpha Release 2017-01-25
• Procedural Macro Attributes on Nightly Rust
• crates.io: Categories and CI badges
• 1.15 release notes

[colin-kiegel]

@Rustaceans/organizers-cologne February is coming fast and we already got RSVPs for our 'regular' meetup on Februar the first: https://www.meetup.com/RustCologne/events/236858848/

• Any suggestions what we can do?
• Shall we try open space again?

[killercup]

Thanks for the reminder @colin-kiegel!

According to http://rusty-dash.com,

Rust 1.15 stable will release on Fri Feb 03 2017.

…which is just after our regular date on February 1. Oh, and 1.15 is the highly anticipated release that stabilizes macros 1.1, i.e. custom derive! Which means we can finally use serde and diesel on stable!

So: How about an evening of hacking on crates using macros 1.1? I don't know about you, @Florob, but I have seen both @colin-kiegel and @badboy fiddle with proc macros over at colin-kiegel/rust-derive-builder#28, so I guess we as organizers can mentor people unfamiliar with this if needed.

By the way, given that most rust stable builds were done a few days ahead of the scheduled date, there is a good chance we get to play with the actual 1.15 release! Otherwise, the beta shouldn't differ from the stable release much.

Suggestions for projects to work on:

• The already linked to derive-builder: Macros one dot one (Do Not Merge) colin-kiegel/rust-derive-builder#28 Update: Feature/macros ono dot one colin-kiegel/rust-derive-builder#32
• Diesel, but the proc macros require a lot of knowledge of the codebase
• One of these fine crates, e.g. validator
• any other project p that could benefit from a p_derive crate!
• help extend the crates used for writing proc macros more comfortably (syn, quote, et.al.), e.g. Simplify processing of structured MetaItems dtolnay/syn#25

[colin-kiegel]

ingenious, I like it :-)

[killercup]

By the way, setting the invite deadline to two weeks before the event will coincide with our meetup next week. I suggest sending it the day after, on Thursday (January 19).

[colin-kiegel]

Ok, I have started an invitation text (first post).

Shall we provide any introductory material or prepare a little demo respository? Tips and Tricks (like commonly used libraries in procedural macros)?

I found this introduction, though slightly outdated (e.g. no feature gate anymore): https://users.rust-lang.org/t/macros-and-syntax-extensions-and-compiler-plugins-where-are-we-at/7600

[Florob]

I haven't looked at Macros 1.1 myself yet. Seems like a great topic though.
I think it would be good if someone could prepare a short introductory talk covering the what, why, and how. Having reference material available is good too, but I think it would be unfortunate if everyone spend the first minutes buried in paper or a laptop to read up on the general concepts.

[killercup]

Good point. Steve recently added this chapter to the docs (note the "beta"): https://doc.rust-lang.org/beta/book/procedural-macros.html Maybe we talk about about the what and why, and then one of us can go through the book's example on the beamer?

…

Am 14.01.2017 um 14:24 schrieb Florob ***@***.***>: I haven't looked at Macros 1.1 myself yet. Seems like a great topic though. I think it would be good if someone could prepare a short introductory talk covering the what, why, and how. Having reference material available is good too, but I think it would be unfortunate if everyone spend the first minutes buried in paper or a laptop to read up on the general concepts. — You are receiving this because you are on a team that was mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

[dtolnay]

I gave a 24-minute talk at the most recent San Francisco meetup: Macros 1.1 + Syn + Quote. Slides are here but are almost entirely code so they don't stand alone as a resource. Feel free to adapt the slides and run through them (in German?) if you think it would be helpful.

[badboy]

@dtolnay Thanks! Having examples at hand is always useful.

@Others: Macros it is!

[colin-kiegel]

🎉

@badboy: others is actually a github user. Seems to live in portland, so I'd be surprised if he joins us. But I guess he gets quite a lot of mentions. ^^

[dtolnay]

I live in the same time zone as Portland and this meetup will be 10:15 in the morning here, so @​others and I will both be available to merge syn/quote PRs, fix bugs, answer questions etc.

[badboy]

Well, that mention to @Others was not intended. Sorry!

@Rustaceans/organizers-cologne: Macros it is!

[killercup]

I updated the title and parts of the description. Will submit a PR to add it to the website as well, which we can merge at the end of the meetup next week so the site gets updated.

[killercup]

Merged the PR to update the website with this event and I may have also mentioned it on twitter.

[colin-kiegel]

only reddit and rustplatz missing now. I can do rustplatz this weekend.

[killercup]

Thanks, @colin-kiegel. I posted it to rustplatz and reddit.

[mre]

Just stumbled upon the following article by @steveklabnik: http://words.steveklabnik.com/an-overview-of-macros-in-rust
Might be a good resource for our next meetup. (Thanks Steve!)

[colin-kiegel]

Picks

Meetups

• Rust Cologne Meetup
• hackover.de (next meetup in Hannover)

Tools

• spacemacs
• racer + vim
• curve25519-dalek in Rust

Books / Blogs

• thursday next (book)
• learn you a haskell for great good! (book)
• niko matsakis blog (http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/)
• rust internals list

Crates

• derive builder
• validator
• faker
• tera (templating library)

Others

• image library from piston project (migrated to Rust)
• get children
• avoid winAPI
• curry sausages around the corner
• Gstreamer
• vulkan API (complicated, fantastically well designed)

[badboy]

Thanks for noting those down!

[colin-kiegel]

here is my talk ..

[chridou]

Currywurst, not Hot Dogs ;-)

[mre]

Oh yeah and the templating engine is called tera, not terra. ;-)

[colin-kiegel]

thx - fixed those two things. :-)