Re: Adding support for xref jumping to headers/interfaces

[João Távora]

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 12:18 AM Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev> wrote:

> > (defmacro eglot--code-action (name kind)
> >    "Define NAME to execute KIND code action."
> >    `(defun ,name (beg &optional end)
> >       ,(format "Execute `%s' code actions between BEG and END." kind)
> >       (interactive (eglot--code-action-bounds))
> >       (eglot-code-actions beg end ,kind t)))
> >
> > And allows us to control exactly the 'interactive' spec of such
> > commands to give us consistency among them.
>
> I'm wary of using macros as framework/library interface in Elisp because
> unless they are very stable, they can cause versioning problems when
> upgrading or reverting to an earlier version. You change a macro, but a
> dependent package is already installed and byte-compiled, and there
> won't be a recompilation until its next update. We might not even intend
> to change them much, but then you don't always anticipate a bugfix.

BTW, these tangents and distractions are possibly what Eli complained
about when trying to follow this discussion about xref, but in the
interest of Lisp programmers out there, what you describe is both a
very real problem and a problem which is trivial to eradicate.   Just
expand to functions.  Here's a general form of a command-defining macro
suitable for a library interface.

(defmacro mylib-define-command (name &rest margs)
   `(defun ,name (&rest args)
       (interactive (mylib--interactive ,@margs))
       (apply #'mylib--doit args)))

Then you can freely change the implementations of mylib--interactive
and mylib--doit in mylib.el.

And there are tricks to concoct the docstring at
consultation time too (see 13.2.4 Documentation Strings of Functions)

João