alt Hacker NewsThere are a couple of constructs that you end up re-creating as soon as you need non-trivial preprocessing.
One of those is the two-stage CAT, another one is the NARG the article talks about.
__COUNTER__ is going to be added to C29, the next version of the standard, maybe there's hope for __VA_COUNT__ and __CAT__ too!
Doing non-trivial preprocessing is a mistake. You get slow compilation, hard to debug code, opaque and fragile code, and incredible complexity. If you want metaprogramming, you're better off with C++ it you need C header compatibility, or zig if you don't.
Otherwise, it's probably a good idea to pretend that the only preprocessing directive is #include. With constexpr, even #define is obsolescent.