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by akiselev
2034 days ago
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I think in theory they’re orthogonal but in practice the two go together. It’s all fine and dandy when you’ve got a restricted set of battle tested macros from a single library interacting in real world code, but it rapidly breaks down when you’ve got application authors of various skill sets all contributing their own macros because the dare not touch the ones that came before. Macro hygiene provides the equivalent of type level guarantees to metaprogramming scope. |
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I lack such comparative experience but my guess would be that if your org's development approach is such that inexperienced people churn out dodgy macros without more expert review you are screwed and having a hygienic macro system will not save you. I'm very sceptical hygienic macros are at all comparable in utility to what a type system provides for multi-dev projects of any size. These benefits of types at scale are fairly massive and apply to basically any code. In contrast macros should make up a tiny amount (much less than 5% certainly) of code in a non-trivial application code base which means careful review is not a big overhead (and in my experience competent programmers do not introduce a lot of hygiene problems). So to be equivalent, in those instances where you do get a benefit from hygiene, that benefit would need to be absolutely massive compared to the average benefit you get of types.