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#35 in Value formatting

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MIT/Apache

1.5MB
37K SLoC

debug3

A space effiecent replacement for std::fmt::Debug

The Pitch

Lets say you have data that looks like this:

let complex_structure = vec![
        vec![None, Some(2)],
        vec![Some(2), None],
        vec![Some(4), Some(777)],
        vec![None, Some(2)],
        vec![Some(2), None],
        vec![None, None, None, None, None],
];

And you want to format it as a string. You could use format!("{:?}", complex_structure) and get something like

[[None, Some(2)], [Some(2), None], [Some(4), Some(777)], [None, Some(2)], [Some(2), None], [None, None, None, None, None]]

But this is too much one one line, and is hard to read. And it gets worse for larger structures.

Fortunaly theirs an alternative format!("{:#?}", complex_structure), which gives

[
    [
        None,
        Some(
            2,
        ),
    ],
    [
        Some(
            2,
        ),
        None,
    ],
    [
        Some(
            4,
        ),
        Some(
            777,
        ),
    ],
    [
        None,
        Some(
            2,
        ),
    ],
    [
        Some(
            2,
        ),
        None,
    ],
    [
        None,
        None,
        None,
        None,
        None,
    ],
]

This has the oposite problem, where it uses too much space, even when the code could be packed denser.

debug3 provides a third option that is denser than :#? but more readable than :?. If you use debug3::pprint(complex_structure), you get

[
    [None, Some(2)],
    [Some(2), None],
    [Some(4), Some(777)],
    [None, Some(2)],
    [Some(2), None],
    [None, None, None, None, None],
]

Overview

The main entrypoint is the Debug trait, which is the equivalent to std::fmt::Debug, and has a similar API.

This can be either #[derive]d, or implemented manually.

use debug3::{Debug, Formatter, pprint};

#[derive(Debug)]
struct MyStruct {
    a: i32,
    b: i32,
}

struct AnotherStruct {
    a: i32,
    b: i32,
}

impl Debug for AnotherStruct {
    fn fmt(&self, f: &mut Formatter) {
        f.debug_struct("AnotherStruct")
            .field("a", &self.a)
            .field("b", &self.b)
            .finish()
    }
}

assert_eq!(pprint(MyStruct { a: 1, b: 2 }), "MyStruct { a: 1, b: 2 }");
assert_eq!(pprint(AnotherStruct { a: 1, b: 2 }), "AnotherStruct { a: 1, b: 2 }");

Once your type implements Debug, you have several options to format it

Comparison to std::fmt::Debug:

While the main advantage of debug3 is the superior output quality, it has several drawbacks compared to std::fmt that you should know

  1. Commonness: Virtually every type in Rust implements std::fmt::Debug, vitrualy no types outside of [std] implement debug3::Debug.
  2. Availibility: std::fmt is also availible as core::fmt, which allows you to use it in no_std environments. debug3 requires several allocated data structures, so cannot support these environments.
  3. Versitility: std::fmt::Formatter has many more API's for implementing std::fmt::Debug. In order to achive nice formatting, we cannot accept arbitrary strings, but must have items in the form of Structs, Tuples, Maps, Lists and Sets.
  4. Configurabiliy: We dont suport stuff like format!("{:x?}, 1) to configure how numbers are printed.
  5. Ease of use: We don't have a macro like std::format to easily create a string from several elements which implement Debug

Prior Art

debug3 would not be possible without all of the following excelent work

  • core::fmt - The public API of Formatter and [builders]
  • prettyplease - Most of the prety printing algorithm is lifted directly from this crate
  • custom_debug - The derive macro for Debug is based on this crate.
  • python's pprint - Inspiration for this type of formatting for debug output.

License

Licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or MIT license at your option.
Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in this crate by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

Dependencies

~0.4–23MB
~287K SLoC