Preprocessors and Macros

I have never encountered anything more pointless and stupid in my years of programming, EVER.

It's pretty much the only thing that holds me back from giving contributions to most open source C programs. Every source file is littered with #ifndefs every-fucking-where. 90% of the code is preprocessor directives and the rest is real C code. It's so fucking pointless and it's not even metaprogramming. I mean #define for using constants? Really? Can't you just use const for that? Sure, it's useful for separating your header files and relating functions in their source files but that's it. Dennis Ritchie should have just built that in the language. Sure, it's also useful compiling different lines of code for different kernel versions or different CFLAGS but whatever, it just proves how broken a programming language is.

What do you think /prog/? I've only parroting C shit, how does your favorite use macros?

>>27
presumably, the point is that microcontroller manufacturers and OS vendors could make their own ENTERPRISE COMPILERS based on LLVM code without releasing the sources to the public, and they can't do that with GCC because of copyleft. it's a valid issue, although the nature of LLVM means that making an open source alternative to a proprietary compiler is easier than it would be otherwise: you need to translate LLVM bytecode, not wrtie a compiler from the scratch.