Native macros were never supposed to be used that way. If anything goes wrong, you still have to deal with that, and no IDE will save you from having to invoke your compiler with “preprocess-only” flag to see what you’re dealing with. Been there, done that, don’t want to do that ever again.

Compared to that, debugging generated code is a breeze.

Also, there’s no “third-party” generators - everything just lives in your own source tree. If I ever need to go meta, it’s just a printf away; I can even commit the generated files to my VCS and be able to see what had changed in them between commits in a simple and understandable diff.

Regarding the integration, I’ll take setting up an additional build phase (once) over having to debug C macros any day.