todo-macro

A Rust macro that stops compiling after a user-specified deadline. Like TODO comments with teeth.

This is just a silly toy for my personal projects, don't use it in a "serious" project unless you're unusually comfortable with non-deterministic builds.

Example

It's January 1, 2020. I'm working on some Rust code that compiles, but it's not quite ready to ship.

I want to take a break, but I know myself – I'll probably forget about the deficiency. I could add a TODO comment, but that depends on me actively searching for TODO comments next time I open the project.

To save me from myself, I add a quick todo macro with a deadline of January 2 (in ISO 8601 format):

// Implement the timeout handling
todo!("2020-01-02");

That compiles for now, but as soon as the deadline is passed (i.e. our system clock returns Jan 3), builds start failing:

error: proc macro panicked
 --> src/main.rs:5:5
  |
5 |     todo!("2020-01-02");
  |     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  |
  = help: message: Tsk tsk. You missed your deadline.

Think of todo as a reminder that actively forces your future self to deal with a problem.

TODO for todo-macro

It would be cool if users didn't even have to specify a date. Like maybe they call todo_in_x_days!(3) and that magically stops compiling after 3 days. This might be doable with some extremely hacky local state, but I'd definitely go to compiler hell for that.

I wonder whether todo could function like Scala's ??? (not implemented) expression, so it replaces entire expressions instead of being used like a statement.

Try+document macro expansion using cargo expand as per this workshop

Prerequisites

You'll need to add #![feature(proc_macro_hygiene)] to your code that uses todo, at least until this Rust issue is sorted out.