generate C structures from high level definition of objects

Question

I have to define high level definition of objects such as :

obj1 => [
    name => "object1",
    type => "uint64",
    dependents => [
         {type  => "unit32", name => "dep1"},
         {type  => "uint32", name => "dep2"}
    ],
    default_value = "100"
]

From this I want to generate the C structures and some helper routines such as:

struct_dependents {
    int type;
    char name[MAX];
}

struct struct_obj1 {
     char name[MAX];
     int  type;
     struct dependents deps[MAX_DEP];
     unit64 default_value;
}

// Some initializations..

Earlier I thought I could define the high level objects in .pm (perl module) files and then use perl to generate C code, but writing code to generate C code this way might be error prone and tough to maintain if object definitions change in future.

What I want to know is that - are there any such ready made tools which allow us to write high level object definition and auto generate their C structures?

Answer 1

There are plenty of code generators for C - you're more likely to find something that uses an intermediary syntax such as xml; A quick google turned up xml2c. You can use XML::Simple for saving your hashes to xml.

More examples can be found on google.

If you wish to roll out your own, code generation using template toolkit provides a flexible approach.