Templating in C

&quot;Nevertheless, this is still a few order of magnitude better than C++ templating.&quot;<p>Uh... no. On a personal level, I have always found that almost any type of preprocessor magic, especially re-#including with a different set of parameters in effect is a recipe for disaster.<p>Any use of the pre-processor seems to have a serious impact on the build-system (tracking parallel variants), the IDE (color, intellisense or auto-completion), the debugger, and apparently any tool that operates at the meta-level.<p>On the other hand, IDEs and debuggers often also have problems with C++ templates as well. Am I crazy to think that the result has generally been better with templates?<p>I think we would better off without any of this. We should: - discard the preprocessor, - expanding and tightening control on templating), and - migrating towards more conventional module import methods, such as <a href="http://clang.llvm.org/docs/Modules.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;clang.llvm.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Modules.html</a> (instead of #include, unless you can fix IWYU).

Curious it doesn&#x27;t mention C11&#x27;s __Generic macro. A very nice way to achieve a lot of useful &quot;overloading&quot; behavior.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C11_%28C_standard_revision%29" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;C11_%28C_standard_revision%29</a>

Just use C++. The lack of semantically aware, <i>type safe</i> templates is one of the deficiencies of C that motivated the development of C++.<p>C++ is a <i>strictly more powerful language</i> than C. Play to its strengths rather than abusing C&#x27;s weaker constructs.

Another solution, which seems to be missing is to use function pointers; process_image could receive a pointer to given function instead of n. My experiences with gcc show, that functions passed by pointer are often inlined, which is not really a surprise, since they are constant arguments of the function.<p>Here is an example [0], although the wrapper functions seem to be redundant in this case.<p>[0] <a href="http://pastebin.com/BAgm61S8" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;BAgm61S8</a>

Why complicate with multiple files, functions, defines and includes; here it is in one file with a single define:<p><a href="http://pastebin.com/uWSs7ca7" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;uWSs7ca7</a><p>We can improve the macro further by removing the unnecessary if statement and the index number:<p><a href="http://pastebin.com/vPTTYPpe" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;vPTTYPpe</a>

I did something similar in a personal project[0], but to avoid reimplementing things like lists and resizable buffers and such over and over again but maintain a sort of &quot;type safety.*&quot; It&#x27;s a step down from C++ templates but it works.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/noobermin/ch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;noobermin&#x2F;ch</a>

I am looking for a book or web page which describes well programming patterns in C (might be focused on OOP in C). I mostly design for embedded systems. Any recomendations?

here&#x27;s a similar technique I use in lthread to generate functions:<p><a href="https://github.com/halayli/lthread/blob/master/src/lthread_socket.c#L311-L365" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;halayli&#x2F;lthread&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;lthread_s...</a><p>the arguments are complete function signature

The most interesting code is dark grey text on black background.

C macros are powerful.

Very interesting!