I actually did this¹⋅² some time ago. Since then I've moved on from a hardcore C developer to C++ and Ada³, but it wasn't necessarily a bad solution. I think given how little C gives you to work with, it's the best solution you can do.

It does make debugging a chore. I ended up with a Makefile rule to run the test suite through the preprocessor (and did some hackery to exclude #include of system headers), format it with clang-format, and build that. Not exactly pretty or easy, but it got the job done.

1. https://github.com/alpha123/yu/blob/master/src/yu_splaytree....

2. https://github.com/alpha123/yu/blob/master/test/test_splaytr...

3. Where this sort of thing is much easier and I am happier and more productive.