The question is whether you do the meta programming/code generation within the language or as external tool. Code bloat is an issue in both cases.
Macros make it easy to write code which generates code which generates code which... This enables some wonderful use cases, often around generating type declarations. If done with an isomorphic language, you can also reuse the same code for compile time and runtime implementations with just thin wrappers.
External code generators however will build faster because the build system takes care of reusing the intermediate code.
The question is whether you do the meta programming/code generation within the language or as external tool. Code bloat is an issue in both cases.
Macros make it easy to write code which generates code which generates code which... This enables some wonderful use cases, often around generating type declarations. If done with an isomorphic language, you can also reuse the same code for compile time and runtime implementations with just thin wrappers.
External code generators however will build faster because the build system takes care of reusing the intermediate code.