inspect.macro

Log an expression and the result of that expression to the console

This is a project I put together to learn more about macros and babel plugins. Also, it scratches an itch of mine. Do you ever find yourself writing

console.log('string description', <complicated expression>);

And then you look at the output, and can't remember precisely what the expression was. You start second-guessing yourself: maybe you did swap the order of the parameters?

So you tab back and forth, trying to compare.

Instead, you can write

import inspect from 'inspect.macro';

inspect(complicatedExpression(involving.many(parts * and * values)));

and your code will be transformed into

console.log(
  'complicatedExpression(involving.many(parts * and * values)) →',
  (function () {
    try {
      return complicatedExpression(involving.many(parts * and * values))
    } catch (e) {
      return 'an error occurred: ' + e;
    }
  }()));

Setup

You'll need to set up babel-plugin-macros. After that, all that's needed is to npm install inspect.macro and import and use it!

See also

• This is made possible by babel-plugin-macros
• babel-plugin-console provides console.scope function that logs everything in the current scope
• Elixir has a function that does this, which was my inspiration.