Perhaps most importantly, a good CL implementation can help with debugging this, by keeping track of the original CL code that generated the intermediate code,

Perhaps most importantly, a good CL implementation can help with debugging this, by keeping track of the original CL code that generated the intermediate code, and pointing you to it. With the "use a program to generate C" approach, if there's some bug in the C code, the best the compiler or runtime can do is point you to the line of C code that's crashing. It's up to you to figure out where that came from. This was a problem for early C++ compilers like Cfront that translated C++ into C: the error messages from the C compiler referenced the intermediate C, not the original C++.