git clone --recursive https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof.git poof
cd poof && ./make.sh BuildAllBinariesRunAllTests

There is a language primer and reference in language_introduction.md

There's a website with some more in-depth examples and an interactive playground if you want quickly give poof a try.

poof is a metaprogramming environment that aims to augment the C programming language with modern, and sometimes experimental, metaprogramming techniques.

poof was born out of frustration with the lack of ergonomics when metaprogramming with C++ templates. The canonical example is printing an enum value as a string. What should be an extremly simple operation turns into an almost comical dance of macros and templates. If you don't to use macros it's even more hilarious. In poof, printing any enum value as it's human-readable string is one concise line, and going back the other way from-string-to-int is also a 1-liner.

See https://scallyw4g.github.io/poof

At the time of this writing, poof relies on itself to generate >15k LoC and makes use of every documented feature.

Bonsai relies on poof to generate >40k LoC, which is mostly a great deal of code for the runtime engine data inspector.

[✓] = finished

[o] = started

[_] = unstarted

[✓] Write example code

[✓] Formally specify feature set for 0.2.0

[o] Write language documentation

[o] Complete implementation of feature set for 0.2.0

[✓] Parse include graph of poof (excluding CRT headers)

[✓] Parse include graph of poof (including CRT headers)

[✓] Write test suite that exhaustively validates behavior of the C parser

[✓] Write test suite that validates the behavior of poof

[✓] parse all C headers on my linux system

[o] parse all C headers on my windows system

[o] parse some open-source C and C++ projects

• [✓] C++ https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof
• [✓] C++ https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai
• [✓] C++ https://github.com/HandmadeHero
• [✓] C++ https://github.com/nakst/gf
• [✓] C https://github.com/ndilieto/uacme
• [✓] C https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite
• [✓] C https://github.com/heroseh/hcc
• [o] C https://github.com/redis/redis

[✓] collate the above projects into an extended integration test suite to ensure we don't break the parser

[✓] Fix a laundry list of issues I have logged that result in unnecessary friction

[✓] Audit error messages; find nonsensical, misleading or missing errors

[✓] Control whitespace in generated code

For examples that are less contrived than the ones found in the documentation section, take a look at the functions used to build poof, and their output.