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khaledh | 3 months ago

The problem with macro-laden C is that your code becomes foreign and opaque to others. You're building a new mini-language layer on top of the base language that only your codebase uses. This has been my experience with many large C projects: I see tons of macros used all over the place and I have no idea what they do unless I hunt down and understand each one of them.

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jnwatson|3 months ago

Like the Linux kernel?

Macros are simply a fact of life in any decent-sized C codebase. The Linux kernel has some good guidance to try to keep it from getting out of hand but it is just something you have to learn to deal with.

naasking|3 months ago

I think this can be fine if the header provides a clean abstraction with well-defined behaviour in C, effectively an EDSL. For an extreme example, it starts looking like a high-level language:

https://www.libcello.org/