Pattern matcher for Protocols

One of the best features of Erlang (and hence Elixir) is the ability to pattern match and use guards directly in function clauses:

defmodule M do
  def m(nil), do: "nil given"
  def m([]), do: "empty list given"
  def m([h|_]), do: "non-empty list given (head: #{inspect(head)}.)"
  def m(msg) when is_binary(message), do: "message given (msg: #{msg}.)"
end

That works perfectly, routing the calls to respective handlers. But what if we want to pattern match the implementation of the protocol ?

That is not possible out of the box and might seem to be tricky. The naïve approach would be to emulate pattern matching:

defprotocol P, do: def pm(this), do: inspect(this)

defmodule M do
  def m(p) do
    unless P.impl_for(p), do: raise MatchError, term: p
    # ...
  end
end

That kinda works, but hey! We have all the ingredients: we have macros in Elixir, we have Kernel#reflections for protocols, we also have an ardour. Let’s cook the matchers ourselves.

We are going to generate all the clauses for all the consolidated protocols, known to the system. Let’s do it:

defmodule ProtoMatcher do
  defmacro defprotomatchers(name, mod, fun) do
    quote do
      with {:consolidated, mods} <- unquote(mod).__protocol__(:impls) do
        for impl <- mods do
          def unquote(name)(%{__struct__: impl} = this) do
            unquote(fun).(this)
          end
        end
      else
        :not_consolidated ->
          raise [
            "Protocols are not consolidated.",
            "That usually happens in `iex`.",
            "Please start iex as `iex -S mix`",
            "    in the project directory to use this feature."]
            |> Enum.join("\n")
      end
    end
  end
end

Now this might be used as:

defmodule M do
  require ProtoMatcher
  ProtoMatcher.defprotomatchers(:checker, Enumerable, fn this -> inspect(this) end)
end

M.checker(%{})
#⇒ ** (FunctionClauseError) no function clause matching in M.checker/1

M.checker(%File.Stream{})
#⇒ "%File.Stream{line_or_bytes: :line, modes: [], path: nil, raw: true}"

That said, the defmodule M above produced:

{:module, M,
 <<70, 79, 82, 49, 0, 0, 5, 56, 66, 69, 65, 77, 65, 116, 85, 56, 0, 0, 0, 174,
   0, 0, 0, 17, 8, 69, 108, 105, 120, 105, 114, 46, 77, 8, 95, 95, 105, 110,
   102, 111, 95, 95, 9, 102, 117, 110, 99, ...>>,
 [
   checker: 1,
   checker: 1,
   checker: 1,
   checker: 1,
   checker: 1,
   checker: 1,
   checker: 1,
   checker: 1,
   checker: 1,
   checker: 1,
   checker: 1,
   checker: 1
 ]}

with 11 implementations of M.checker/1 :

M.__info__(:functions)
#⇒ [checker: 1]

Now you have a function (a set of 11 functions, to be precise,) that effectively matches only implementations of the Enumerable protocol.

---

There is definitely a room for improvements, like packing everything into a __using__/1 macro, allowing blocks and delegates besides the anonymous function as a handler, better customization for how to handle different implementations, callbacks, cold beer...

Maybe once I’ll publish this as a package to hex, but for now this blog is fine enough.