Nathan Ridge wrote
I've noticed preprocessor metaprogramming has become more popular of late, both as a means to provide a cleaner alternative interface to a library (e.g. the DEFINE and ADAPT macros in Boost.Fusion or the proposed macro wrappers for Boost.TypeErasure) and as a means to emulate new language features (e.g. Boost.LocalFunction, Boost.Generic, and Boost.Contract).
Sadly, IDE support for writing macro metaprograms is fairly poor in comparison to IDE support for writing regular C++ code.
I wanted to share with you something I've found very useful for tracing/debugging macro metaprograms: the Eclipse CDT IDE has a "macro stepper" that allows you to step through the expansion of a macro step-by-step from the initial invocation to the final expansion. (This feature can be accessed by using the "Explore Macro Expansion" context menu item on a macro invocation.)
I would be curious to hear what tools you have found useful for writing or debugging macro metaprograms.
I do this manually expanding the macros before compilation with -E -P compiler options (or /EP...) and inspecting by eye the lengthy expanded macro code. But I'm a vi guy that uses gdb and Linux command line -- so I like things raw ;) I was planning to use the Eclipse feature you indicated to benchmark macro expansion times/steps in order to optimize my pp meta-programs but I didn't get around to do that yet. Thanks. --Lorenzo -- View this message in context: http://boost.2283326.n4.nabble.com/preprocessor-metaprogramming-tools-tp4632... Sent from the Boost - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.