Support items generated by proc macros

For example, let’s say I am using the crate derive_builder with the following code snippet:

#[derive(Clone, Debug, Builder)]
pub struct MyStruct {
    foo: String
}

derive_builder generates a new struct named MyStructBuilder. I’d like to have this generated MyStructBuilder struct available as an autocomplete option to make its usage easier.

[atroche]

I probably should’ve checked if you’re okay with my doing this, but I’ve created a bounty for this issue on BountySource to encourage contributions.

[bes]

When I was a beginner Rustacean, 12 months ago, I was intrigued by the possibility to leave memory hogs such as Spring/Java and replace them with seemingly nice alternatives like Rocket/Diesel.

At that stage I found Rocket’s documentation to be very good, and Diesel’s getting started guide was at least good enough to get started. At least in combination with some random blog posts.

Then I started to flesh out my app with more and more SQL tables, and frankly I hit a brick wall.

At that stage, I was desperately seeking information on how to do really basic things with Diesel, but the Diesel web page only covers the super basic things, and the crate documentation is literally impenetrable it’s just pages of traits and generic parameters. I still can’t write a good generic function to do things that are really easy to understand using e.g. jOOQ in Java, but that’s besides the point.

It would have saved me a lot of time to have that autocomplete available for things that Diesel generated in procedural macros.

I finally figured most of the things out by combining information from blogs, stackoverflow, and random github issues.

If I didn’t really really like rust (which I do!) I probably would have just given up.

TL;DR For beginner/intermediate Rustaceans procedural macro autocomplete is really important. As your understanding of the language and tooling (and cargo expand) grows, it becomes less important.

That’s why I personally think it would be a great investment to have in intellij-rust. But I also understand that it’s complicated and hard to implement.