Oliver
Lately I have been macro-generating code from ASN1 definitions files.
I basically:
- Read the file
- Extract the interesting data with…
- regular expressions or string processing into a map or
- other simplified form
- Use elixir macros to pull in this information and generate functions from it
Now so far that is only a rehash of the “Metaprogramming Elixir” book but bear with me.
Even though the ASN.1 is rather regular I do realize that using regular expressions is rather brittle.
So, what if you were instead using a proper parser (any which is accessible from elixir) to more reliably parse your input files and then post-process the abstract syntax trees? You get compile-time code generation magic!
Or so I hope…
Sometimes the things you can do with 10-20 lines of elixir are purely amazing. Even now my code for generating ASN.1 convenience functions is roughly that size for each function - half of it is the extraction of the information, half of it is the macro to generate the function(s). elixir always provides new ways to make my hacking happy. 
Where Next?
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dimitarvp
Erlang docs on ASN.1:
Unless I misunderstand you.
BTW I worked with legacy ASN.1-dependent apps and I am very interested in any Elixir ASN.1 encoders and decoders. If you can open-source yours, I’ll be a fan!
Oliver
I’ve been using asn1ct for the actual encoding and decoding stuff for a few years now, but there are things it doesn’t provide. Much of that “missing” code I used to write “by hand.” Now I’m just directly pre-processing the .asn files I have and define new functions through macros.
Mostly convenience stuff, really. But it really speaks for elixir that I can write this code not only in elixir, but have it executed at compile time and it is rather short and concise, and the code I generate is immediately available to the rest of my application.
dimitarvp
Considered open-sourcing it?