C Language X-macros Code generation
Example
X-Macros can be used for code generation, by writing repetitive code: iterate over a list to do some tasks, or to declare a set of constants, objects or functions.
Here we use X-macros to declare an enum containing 4 commands and a map of their names as strings
Then we can print the string values of the enum.
/* All our commands */
#define COMMANDS(OP) OP(Open) OP(Close) OP(Save) OP(Quit)
/* generate the enum Commands: {cmdOpen, cmdClose, cmdSave, cmdQuit, }; */
#define ENUM_NAME(name) cmd##name,
enum Commands {
COMMANDS(ENUM_NAME)
};
#undef ENUM_NAME
/* generate the string table */
#define COMMAND_OP(name) #name,
const char* const commandNames[] = {
COMMANDS(COMMAND_OP)
};
#undef COMMAND_OP
/* the following prints "Quit\n": */
printf("%s\n", commandNames[cmdQuit]());
Similarly, we can generate a jump table to call functions by the enum value.
This requires all functions to have the same signature. If they take no arguments and return an int, we would put this in a header with the enum definition:
/* declare all functions as extern */
#define EXTERN_FUNC(name) extern int doCmd##name(void);
COMMANDS(EXTERN_FUNC)
#undef EXTERN_FUNC
/* declare the function pointer type and the jump table */
typedef int (*CommandFunc)(void);
extern CommandFunc commandJumpTable[];
All of the following can be in different compilation units assuming the part above is included as a header:
/* generate the jump table */
#define FUNC_NAME(name) doCmd##name,
CommandFunc commandJumpTable[] = {
COMMANDS(FUNC_NAME)
};
#undef FUNC_NAME
/* call the save command like this: */
int result = commandJumpTable[cmdSave]();
/* somewhere else, we need the implementations of the commands */
int doCmdOpen(void) {/* code performing open command */}
int doCmdClose(void) {/* code performing close command */}
int doCmdSave(void) {/* code performing save command */}
int doCmdQuit(void) {/* code performing quit command */}
An example of this technique being used in real code is for GPU command dispatching in Chromium.
