Related to this question on Software Engineering about easily serializing various struct contents on demand, I found an article which uses x-macros to create struct metadata needed for "out of the box" struct serialization. I've also seen similar techniques for "smart enums", but it boils down to the same principle, getting a string representation of an enum, or a struct's field value by its name, or something similar.
However experienced C programmers on Stack Overflow state that the x-macros should be avoided as the "last resort":
- Generic enum to text lookup in C
- Nested macro iteration with C preprocessor
- How to access member of struct dynamically in C?
I could probably find many more related threads, but unfortunately I didn't bookmark them so this is just some Google-fu.
Perhaps the correct answer is something like Protocol Buffers? But why would creating struct definition in a different language (.proto definitions) and then running a build step to generate C files be preferable to using the built-in preprocessor for the same thing? And the issue is that these techniques still don't let me retrieve a single struct by name, I must share the same definition between two projects and keep them in sync.
So the question is then: If x-macros are "last resort", which approach for my problem (easily serializing various internal data when requested from a different device) would be "first resort", or anything before resorting to macro hell?