[question] importing modules in staticmodules

[tlienart]

you say explicitly in the readme that static modules don't support 'using', I'm wondering whether there's any path to importing foreign code in a static module as that would something I'd find quite helpful.

For context in Franklin.jl pages with Julia code have the code executed in a module that's tied to the page; it's the same idea (I think) as the static module except that it's not as clean and it's a full module so import statements will work.
It might improve overall code quality if I were to use something dedicated instead of my own soup but I'd need to be able have import statements.

Is this impossible due to the way it's constructed and the only way is effectively having a full module?

I could see Weave being interested in this too (the above mentioned soup is adapted from Weave code).

[MasonProtter]

Hm, I'm not sure I've thought about this enough to have a good response. One idea that comes to mind is to make a @using macro for use inside a StaticModule, but only works on packages that have already been imported.

e.g. you could have something like

using StaticModules
import StaticArrays

@staticmodule Foo begin
    @using StaticArrays
    SA[1 2]
end

which would get turned into

@staticmodule Foo begin
    SA = StaticArrays.SA
    SVector = StaticArrays.SVector
    ...
    SA[1 2]
end

[tlienart]

That would be quite nice yes!

[MasonProtter]

One concern I'd have is that since a StaticModule wraps a NamedTuple, we might start running into the problems inherent with large tuples if a package exports too many names.

[tlienart]

would this be solved if we only used an @import macro? possibly with explicit names like @import StaticArrays: SA ?

[MasonProtter]

Hm, the @unpack macro from Parameters.jl is basically what we want actually.

julia> using Parameters, StaticModules; import StaticArrays

julia> @staticmodule Foo begin
           @unpack SA, SVector = StaticArrays
           v = SA[1,2,3]
       end
StaticModule Foo containing
  SVector = SArray{Tuple{S},T,1,S} where T where S
  v       = [1, 2, 3]
  SA      = SA
  ##253   = StaticArrays

[MasonProtter]

I kinda like the name @unpack for this because it makes it clear that the macro isn't actually going to import StaticArrays if it's not already present.

I could just add a dependency on Parameters.jl and provide @unpack if that would be helpful to you.

[tlienart]

That's great! No I think your example is perfect maybe it doesn't need to be in especially if ultimately your macro gets integrated in Parameters :)

Thanks for this!

[MasonProtter]

I put a note into the README about this, thanks for bringing it up. https://github.com/MasonProtter/StaticModules.jl#replacements-for-using