3 ms·

Walter Bright related his own tale about the problems macros can cause here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25423730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=

Walter Bright related his own tale about the problems macros can cause here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25423730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25423730 but that was with assembler, which is a whole nother kettle of fish "The trouble was the author had used the macro language that came with the assembler to invent his own quirky, weird, undocumented and thoroughly impenetrable language. None of the programmers could figure it out. He was lamenting that he'd have to assign a programmer to recreating it from scratch, which would take months and cost a lot of money." (This was related on the passing of Eric Engstrom, who fixed it)

jart 6y ago
That's a good story. I ran into the same issue when I wrote Actually Portable Executable. Most operating systems and libc implementation have been "ported to death" in the sense that it's nearly impossible to determine the actual typing of interface structs and typedefs, due to a labyrinthine web of #ifdefs and macros. So most of the time, rather than reading the C source code, I'd just read the object disassembly and STABS listings. It's very disheartening that open source can suffer such tragedy of the commons that the source code is less useful than the binaries. Tyranny of the minority.