Black Magic

impossible is not a C keyword

Learn about C preprocessor tricks

This book delves into techniques to generate C code with the preprocessor, starting with a reminder about what the preprocessor is and how it is integrated in the C compilation pipeline, then building up increasingly complex tools anyone can use in their C projects.

Read it online !

Tools

Add this project as a dependency to your C project today (using Zig, Nix or Conan) to get:

• ANSI color codes as a string literal by writing COLOR(UNDERLINED, BOLD, RED) blackmagic/color.h
• Convert enums to/from strings blackmagic/enum.h
• Logs with a compile-time configurable format and level blackmagic/log.h

Roadmap

I would like to explain the following tricks in the book:
Logging
Default arguments
Function overloading
Enum to/from string
Serialization / Deserialization of a structure
Unit-tests library

Extras

• Sphinx directive to show C code before and after preprocessing
• Custom pygment lexer to color the code the way the preprocessor sees it

Use it

With Zig build as your C package manager

Add the dependency in your build.zig.zon by running the following command:

zig fetch --save git+https://github.com/agagniere/blackmagic#master

Then, in your build.zig:

const blackmagic = b.dependency("blackmagic", .{});
// wherever needed:
exe.addIncludePath(blackmagic.path("include"));

With Conan

Add the dependency in your conanfile.txt

[requires]
blackmagic/0.3