Static return type of Scala macros

Question

So I\'ve got this macro:

import language.experimental.macros
import scala.reflect.macros.Context

class Foo
class Bar extends Foo { def launchMissiles = \"la         


        

Answer 1

This behavior is underspecified but intended, though it might appear confusing. We plan to elaborate on the role of return type in macro signatures, but at the moment I feel like the flexibility is a good thing to have.

Also at times the behavior is inconsistent, e.g. when the macro is caught in the middle of type inference, its static signature will be used (i.e. Foo in your example), not the type of the actual expansion. That's because macro expansion is intentionally delayed until type inference is done (so that macro implementations get to see inferred types, not type vars). This is a trade-off and not necessarily the best one, so we're planning to revisit it soon: https://issues.scala-lang.org/browse/SI-6755.

Another problem in this department is with implicit macros. When the return type of an implicit macro is generic and needs to be inferred from the requested type of an implicit value, bad things happen. This makes it currently impossible to use macros to generate type tags: https://issues.scala-lang.org/browse/SI-5923.