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Comment by gsmecher | Hacker News Reader

To date, C's most proximate (management-friendly, technically similar, programmer-skill-adjacent) competition has been c++. (I'm trying to lay the groundwork for the next statement: I'm not claiming this is good, and excited to see Rust and friends as serious contenders. Stay with me.)

Even in c++20, there are things you can do with macros you can't do in the language. This may change when reflection lands in c++2x, but I won't be able to use it for years and widespread adoption won't be possible for another decade.

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When I look at a lot of things that are done with reflection in C# I personally would much prefer the preprocessor and macros. Things that could be done in a type safe manner with a macro in a few lines become way more complex when using reflection.

Could I beg of you to give an example?

Back when I was working in C#, there were quite a few times when I'd encounter things being done with reflection that I wish had been done with less code and a more type safe manner by just... not using reflection. I always just assumed a lot of that was just bad habits left over from the .NET 1.0 days, back before generics. So I'm curious if there's much overlap there? If it's only a subset, I don't know C as well as I'd like, so it would be interesting to see something that the C preprocessor handles better.

For example INotifyPropertyChanged which is used in WPF.

The typical implementation is something like this:

     public string CustomerName  
        {  
            get  
            {  
                return this.customerNameValue;  
            }  

            set  
            {  
                if (value != this.customerNameValue)  
                {  
                    this.customerNameValue = value;  
                    NotifyPropertyChanged();  
                }  
            }  
        }

When you have 20 properties you have a ton of repetitive code. With a preprocessor I could reduce each property to a one liner. You can also do tricks with reflection but that's way more complex to implement.

Yeah, there is that, but I wash hoping to see a great use case for C preprocessor macros. WPF data binding doesn't seem like good candidate for something you're likely to want to do in a C program.

Or were you really just meaning to advocate for metaprogramming in general?

I design instrumentation for telescopes, in which C code on an embedded processor peeks and pokes device registers on an nearby FPGA. This C code forms an interface between hardware and the network.

In this system, I write a given function in C and surround it with a macro wrapper. This wrapper generates a JSON-RPC equivalent of the C function using the Jansson JSON library [1], complete with argument typechecking and error management. My C code can call the function normally, and an embedded webserver [2] can export it across the network where it's used fairly transparently by a Python stack on a control PC.

All three of these "embedded software" elements (the embedded webserver, the JSON library, and the FPGA interface) are very well suited to C. I have recently dabbled in moving parts of it to C++, and have found a few surprising impedance mismatches. (As I mentioned above, C++ still lacks reflection.)

The macros, here, are not for "elegance" or any other abstract purpose. They have allowed a ~80% reduction in boilerplate and an equally impressive reduction in the bugs and hassles associated with this kind of low-density, high-sprawl code.

[1]: https://digip.org/jansson/

[2]: https://www.gnu.org/software/libmicrohttpd

I'm a huge fan of java because of reflection. It can be so empowering and awesome. But lately I've come to prefer codegen+JIT when possible. So, discovery through introspection, and to call/read/modify stuff I'll generate the code.

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