Blog Post: A fun, but trivial, limitation in Elixir ExUnit (/Macros)

It seems unlikely that anyone will find these facts interesting or useful, but here they are anyway.

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This is not a limitation of ExUnit. This applies to everywhere in elixir. Module attributes essentially work by injecting the AST of the value into wherever the module attribute is used to provide a value. Values like a port don’t really have AST, which would give you the value back at runtime, which you had at compile time, so this doesn’t work. The same applies to any other value not easily transfered as AST from compile time to runtime, like e.g. anonymous functions.

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Maybe the title’s not great, but that’s why I stuck the (/Macros) at the end. Your explanation does shed some light on this though - thanks.

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