It's been 14 years since I last used a precompiler like moc (it wasn't moc), and it was a pain - all the nice IDE features (syntax highlighting, code completion

It's been 14 years since I last used a precompiler like moc (it wasn't moc), and it was a pain - all the nice IDE features (syntax highlighting, code completion, automatic indentation, source level debugging, etc.) were all broken in subtle or major ways. moc (specifically) has a long track record that I would expect this to be solved -- no experience myself -- but regardless of how easy it is to add another build step, most precompilation stages are correlated with reduced tool functionality.