Hands-On Design Patterns and Best Practices with Julia

Simplifying code with the @kwdef macro

Given that the keyword definition pattern addresses a fairly common use case, there is already a macro provided by Julia to help define structs along with constructors accepting keyword arguments. The macro is currently not exported, but you can use it directly as follows:

Base.@kwdef struct TextStyle    font_family    font_size    font_weight = "Normal"    foreground_color = "black"    background_color= "white"    alignment = "center"    rotation = 0end

Basically, we can just place the Base.@kwdef macro in front of the type definition. As a part of the type definition, we can also provide default values. The macro automatically defines the struct and the corresponding constructor function with keyword arguments. We can ...