Exactly, the alternative to not having code generation as a language feature is not people not doing it, it's : - people writing external code generators (moc,

Exactly, the alternative to not having code generation as a language feature is not people not doing it, it's : - people writing external code generators (moc, MIDL, tinyrefl, a random python script, and a hundred other possibilities) - people doing code generation in their build system (CMake allows that relatively easily for instance) - people doing code generation with macros (verdigris instead of moc, boost.pp) - people writing clang extensions which get outdated in 6 months due to LLVM code churn (https://github.com/AustinBrunkhorst/CPP-Reflection https://github.com/AustinBrunkhorst/CPP-Reflection and a few others) e.g. just look at one of the latest C++ questions on SO : https://stackoverflow.com/a/61623940/1495627 https://stackoverflow.com/a/61623940/1495627 People are ressorting to friggin bash scripts because they don't have that feature. Between unmaintainable bash scripts, and type-checked C++ code, what do you think is better ?