[OT] C vs C++

[JG]

On Saturday, 10 September 2022 at 13:58:51 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 10, 2022 at 05:57:53AM +0000, JG via Digitalmars-d 
> wrote:
>> > [...]
> [...]
>> [...]
>
> In fact, this is precisely the advantage of separately 
> generating the code: you can examine the generated .d file for 
> yourself and see precisely what was generated.
>
>
>> [...]
>
> Template-heavy / mixin-filled code is a nightmare to debug, if 
> they were not written to be debuggable. Because you cannot see 
> what's the final code that the compiler compiles.  Whereas 
> generating a .d file as a separate compilation step lets you 
> examine the file yourself and find where the bug is.
>
>
>> [...]
>
> That's because the diet templates' code was written to generate 
> these nice error messages. When you run into a case the authors 
> didn't anticipate, good like trying to debug the heavily-nested 
> diet code...
>
> Of course, an error in a separately-generated .d file may not 
> be trivial to debug either, but presumably you also wrote the 
> helper utility that did it, so by seeing the error in the 
> generated .d file, it would guide you to look at the section of 
> the helper utility responsible for generating that bit of code, 
> and you can go from there.
>
>
>> [...]
>
> This is another disadvantage of using templates/mixins: 
> external tools have to be able to parse templates and magically 
> infer what exactly is the mixed-in string, in order to help 
> you.  An externally-generated .d file is just regular D code, 
> you just use standard code utilities on it and you're ready to 
> go.
>
>
> T

I agree in part with what you say, perhaps I will try it again 
sometime.
My last attempt was a few years ago being fed up writing go and 
not having templates. So I wrote a program that transformed "my 
templated go" into go.
For small things it was fine but when I tried to use it more 
seriously I
found trying to bug fix it painful. (In case someone feels the 
need to inform me that go has generics now - I am aware of that. 
I tried them I think they are not too great).