Compiling a Static Web Site Using the C Preprocessor

Nice piece of history. You can see its age showing:

"Rather quickly it was realized that if you want to ensure a reasonable user experience both on desktops and mobiles, there is absolutely no way you can use the same HTML for both sites."

Congrats, you've re-discovered the same origin where PHP started nearly 20 years ago.

Maybe you could replace the generic c preprocessor dialect with a new domain specific DSL. For instance one where macros can simply be embedded directly into HTML. For instance everything between the <? and ?> is parsed as macros. /s

I wonder if one could propose that "any sufficiently complicated static website compiler contains an ad-hoc, informally specificed, bug ridden, slow implementation of half of PHP..."

Haha, I never thought of it like that before.

That probably holds true for any one written in C. Maybe even some others that use server-side view generation.

> In fact, almost any kind of text processor can be used to compile web sites in a similar way to what has been described above (for example, m4 ...

I thought about m4 all the time while reading through that post...

The only time I ever used M4 was when trying to create a Sendmail configuration. I really disliked it.