enhray
Joined 8 years ago
Joined 8 years ago
You can apply an AI-powered “Starry Night” filter to any picture, but do you really think Van Gogh would draw something like that?
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.
The traditional way to do any kind of meaningful metaprogramming in C is just a printf() to a .h or .c file which then is included to your build.
There are a lot of projects doing that. Bison is supposed to be used this way, other projects are doing build configuration like that - by emitting a header with a ton of #define’s, and there’s a ton of languages which use C as a compilation target - and you can see what they are doing and get inspiration from that.
In my opinion it’s an extremely powerful model, much better than anything you can do with the preprocessor.
Edit: and that Facebook project is called OsQuery [1]. It was built on top of SQLite virtual tables and is listed in their implementations list.