Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Post History

75%
+4 −0
Q&A How to partially pre-process a file, without expanding #include or #embed ?

I'm debugging some "clever" macros (similar to, but not exactly the same as, X macros https://software.codidact.com/posts/293492 ). Is there a way to get a compiler or a preprocessor (such as gc...

1 answer  ·  posted 6mo ago by DavidCary‭  ·  last activity 5mo ago by LolPopGames‭

Question c c-preprocessor
#1: Initial revision by user avatar DavidCary‭ · 2026-03-12T00:35:14Z (6 months ago)
How to partially pre-process a file, without expanding #include or #embed ?
I'm debugging some "clever" macros 
(similar to, but not exactly the same as, X macros https://software.codidact.com/posts/293492
).

Is there a way to get a compiler or a preprocessor (such as `gcc` or `cpp` or `gpp`) to expand only "short" macros and leave "long" preprocessor stuff alone? so if I have something like

    #include <enormous_library>
    #include <some_other_library>
    #embed "embedded_literals.txt"

    int main(void){
        set_baud_rate(baud_rate)
    }

and one of those libraries mentions

    #define baud_rate 1200

I want to somehow generate a (relatively short) partially-preprocessed file something like

    #include <enormous_library>
    #include <some_other_library>
    #embed "embedded_literals.txt"

    int main(void){
        set_baud_rate(1200)
    }

The

    gcc -save-temps 

option tells gcc to expand *all* the preprocessor stuff into an enormous file with a copy of all the libraries and embedded literals, which can make what I'm looking for hard to find.