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Comment by jacquesm

As a very long time C programmer: don't try to be smart. The more you rely on fancy preprocessor tricks the harder it will be to understand and debug your code.

The C preprocessor gives you enough power to shoot yourself in the foot, repeatedly, with anything from small caliber handguns to nuclear weapons. You may well end up losing control over your project entirely.

One nice example: glusterfs. There are a couple of macros in use there that, when they work are magic. But when they don't you lose days, sometimes weeks. This is not the way to solve coding problems, you only appear smart as long as you remember what you've built. Your other self, three years down the road is going to want to kill the present one, and the same goes for your colleagues a few weeks from now.

parent jacquesm 1 year ago

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