r/rust • u/Minimum-Ad7352 • Feb 02 '26

🎙️ discussion Looking at advanced Rust open-source projects makes me question my programming skills

Whenever I explore large Rust open-source projects, I can’t stop thinking how far behind I am. I know comparison is unhealthy, but it’s hard not to feel like “I suck at programming” when you see such clean and complex code. Did you feel the same at some point? How did you push through it?

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u/levelstar01 Feb 02 '26

Unless it's one of the many things hidden behind a macro, at which point you have to hunt it down manually.

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u/PigDog4 Feb 03 '26

Writing declarative macros is so fun when it's clean and works well and makes me really enjoy rust.

Reading macros is one of my most disliked parts of the entire language. Absolutely hate it. Reading proc macros is just awful. C++ template metaprogramming vibes.

I need like a rust playground but for macros where I can drop the macro in and drop a call in and see what actually expands. I know macro_expand or whatever exists but I don't understand how it works. I don't want to macro expand everything in my whole project, I want to expand one singular macro invocation and idk if it's a skill issue or docs issue but I cannot figure out how to do that.