Sweet.js – Hygienic Macros for JavaScript

The last thing the JS community needs is macros IMO. From what I've seen in other languages, macros are difficult to maintain and document, and they add syntax constructs to languages that aren't supported by code highlighters. The difference between this and babel, is documentation. Babel is working off of a specification of how the language should work, whereas I doubt someone will document their macros as well as TC39 does the JS syntax

Coming from a Scheme background, if there's one thing I can't believe we live without in Javascript, it's macros. Hell even C has macros... I've looked at Sweet.js a few times to add support for macros to the Linode Manager. Between m4, the gcc preprocessor, and something native, this seemed like the easiest potential sell. However, I've been turned off by how complicated this looks compared to any of the other options and I'm not sure it actually even supports the feature I want: allow some code to show up in "development" mode but for that code to not even exist in the compiled output of "production" mode. (The other feature that's just as important though is being able to wrap shared code up in a single function that gets compiled in at compile time, but I think Sweet.js supports that.)

The in-the-wild code I've seen that uses Sweet.js has been atrocious. Of course I'm not saying that this is necessarily the case. I'd love to see some real world examples whter this is used effectively.

We were looking into sweetjs for adding cross-module contracts to the graphistry stack, but nixed the project when it became too much to generate code that passed our basic linters. TS largely scratches that itch, so we've been moving to that. I'm still hopeful though :)

I personally prefer MetaScript [1] as it&#x27;s comment based so JavaScript highlighters&#x2F;linters don&#x27;t have issues with it.<p>It is also essentially JavaScript so no special syntax had to be learned.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dcodeIO&#x2F;MetaScript" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dcodeIO&#x2F;MetaScript</a>

this is already covered in basically any AST transform systems (babylon, acorn, TS...)

Can someone please explain macros, in an easy to grasp way?

What would hygienic mean in this context?

Also known as: &#x27;how to build your own javascript dialect that you won&#x27;t be able to hire for&#x27;