Definitely don't limit yourself to the C preprocessor. That way lies a tarpit. M4 took several months off me, it can definitely be used to do things but maybe s

Definitely don't limit yourself to the C preprocessor. That way lies a tarpit. M4 took several months off me, it can definitely be used to do things but maybe shouldn't be. A really bad play was generating C++ from cmake as a compromise that delighted noone. Python is good at generating C source. I changed to mostly using lua five years ago as python climbed the complexity curve. Sometimes the right thing is C itself, e.g. laying out data based on sizes of various C types. Currently I'm trying to use xslt to emit syntax trees that pretty print to get the generated source in what is probably a dead end.