C source-to-source compiler enhancement from within

A new research report describing shnell has now appeared on HAL:

https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02998412

We show how locally replaceable code snippets can be used to easily specify and prototype compiler and language enhancements for the C language that work by local source-to-source transformation. A toolbox implements the feature and provides many directives that can be used for compile time configuration and tuning, code unrolling, compile time expression evaluation and program modularization. The tool is also easily extensible by simple filters that can be programmed with any suitable text processing framework.