[OT] C vs C++

[JG]

On Friday, 9 September 2022 at 15:58:12 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 09, 2022 at 09:36:16AM +0000,
...
> In fact, in my own D projects I have resorted to external 
> codegen in some cases, instead of adding yet another layer of 
> mixins/templates to the code.  Sometimes, it's not worth the 
> extra complexity and maintenance burden just to have the 
> bragging rights that you did it all within the confines of the 
> language; sometimes, the more sensible thing to do is just to 
> write a utility program that generates the desired D code, and 
> compile that into your main executable.
>
> (Of course, this does assume a reasonably sane build system... 
> if you're stuck with Certain Hobbled Build Tools 
> *cough*notnamingnameshere*cough*, then over-complex templates 
> and unreadable mixins may be your only recourse. :-P)
>
>
> T

In my experience this can lead to, hard to debug code, since the 
error is in the generated code. Although of course debugging 
template heavy or mixin filled code is also not a picnic. How do 
you avoid this kind of  problem? For instance if you use, say, 
vide.d templates, which are an example of heavy usage of compile 
time features, and make a mistake in a template you often get a 
somewhat meaningful error message relating to the template file. 
This would probably be harder  with an external tool (since it 
would have to be able error check arbitrary d).