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Showing posts from March, 2016

An IS_DEFINED() C macro to check whether another macro is defined

Every C programmer knows to use #defines and #ifdefs to disable compilation for a piece of code. But not everyone knows that there are better ways; the problem with this strategy is that the code becomes invisible to the compiler (and "smart" indexers), which means that it stops being checked for correctness. Also, if the rest of the code changes substantially, like variable renaming, function changing their signatures, etc, the disabled part falls out of sync and will need possibly serious work when re-enabled. There are easy improvements to the #ifdef strategy, with the inconvenience that they add boilerplate and/or waste cycles on runtime (important on embedded environments). But there's also a way to remove both the boilerplate AND the runtime checks!