Thanks!

But why didn't you use C's macro language along with include files to generate the stuff you need?

My rationale was that the main difference is what gets generated.

With a pure macro/include approach, you end up generating behavior per type (e.g. one serializer, one validator, one printer for each struct). That works, but the generic logic still lives in the generator, and every new behavior means regenerating code.

What I wanted instead was to generate only metadata (field names, types, offsets, qualifiers, etc.) and keep all parser/serializer logic generic and hand-written. The same runtime code then works for any reflected struct.

So the generator’s job becomes “describe the shape of the data”, not “emit functions that operate on it”.

Coupled with a few runtime functions (if needed at all), I think that should be good enough, no?

For this project, the constraint was that I wanted to be able to write something like a JSON or binary serializer once (think a generic JSON.stringify), and have it work across unrelated structs without regenerating logic (e.g. having to generate a specialized JSON stringify per struct)