# How to discourage macros: disable automerge of General registry PRs?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-discourage-macros-disable-automerge-of-general-registry-prs/104529>\
**Category:** Internals & Design\
**Tags:** macros, metaprogramming, general-registry, macro-hygiene\
**Created:** [October 3, 2023, 8:43am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-discourage-macros-disable-automerge-of-general-registry-prs/104529 "2023-10-03T08:43:31Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 10

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**Author:** ![goerz](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/goerz/32/3269_2.png) [@goerz](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/goerz)\
**Post date:** [October 3, 2023, 3:38pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-discourage-macros-disable-automerge-of-general-registry-prs/104529/10 "2023-10-03T15:38:26Z")

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I feel like macros in Julia are a quite self-regulating _because_ they are difficult to implement. At least every time I’ve written a non-trivial macro it quickly turned into “This is really hard… Is there any way I can do this without writing a macro?”

As such, I don’t see that there is a problem with overuse of macros across the ecosystem.

Also, in [the other thread](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/general-registry-create-tag-for-macro-usage/104528), there seems to have been some confusion between _defining_ macros and _using_ macros. Difficulties with, e.g., jumping to the definition of a macro are a tooling problem (and IMO, immature tooling may be Julia’s biggest concern, but just a consequence of the language being so young), not a problem of macros per se. Certainly, macros are very much at the core of the language (`@test`, `@assert`, `@show`, `@warn`, `@printf`, …) and calling them is completely normal.

As for _writing_ macros, the warning in the manual applies, but I really don’t think we need to do anything to nudge people away from them beyond that.

> Are these ideas good?

Sorry, but no 😉

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