Agreed, I've been in this situation twice and both times it was completely terrible.
The worst codebase I ever worked on was some C++ generated using a scripting language. It made awkward and unweildy looking C++ code that leaked smart pointers everywhere and barely worked. But man, the authors that wrote it thought they were so clever.
Apple's Objective-C to MSVC C++ clang compiler is a close second. I'm not sure if it ever made it out into the wild or if it was just an Apple internal thing, but there's nothing like debugging a 3000 character post-preprocessor C++ expansion of several nested obc_msgsend calls.
It's rough when you long for the C preprocessor. At least the CPP limitations prevent people from stretching themselves too far into meta territory. It's almost kind of elegant in its badness, now that I've seen what people can do to imperative/OO languages when more capable macro processors are involved.
The worst codebase I ever worked on was some C++ generated using a scripting language. It made awkward and unweildy looking C++ code that leaked smart pointers everywhere and barely worked. But man, the authors that wrote it thought they were so clever.
Apple's Objective-C to MSVC C++ clang compiler is a close second. I'm not sure if it ever made it out into the wild or if it was just an Apple internal thing, but there's nothing like debugging a 3000 character post-preprocessor C++ expansion of several nested obc_msgsend calls.
It's rough when you long for the C preprocessor. At least the CPP limitations prevent people from stretching themselves too far into meta territory. It's almost kind of elegant in its badness, now that I've seen what people can do to imperative/OO languages when more capable macro processors are involved.