D mixin templates/mixins are another alternative: You can include arbitrary strings from functions running at compile time. Theoretically they're more powerful than C macros, but type safety(template parameters) makes some constructs awkward - unless you create and parse strings as tokens manually(basically reading/writing many strings to achieve what C preprocessor does with symbolic token composition). https://dlang.org/mixin.html https://dlang.org/spec/template-mixin.html Templates can also include mixins: template liter(String s){mixin(s);}

Or mix in a Scheme that compiles to C, like Gambit, Chicken, or Bigloo. You can leave the low level and performance sensitive stuff in C.