I needed a simple static site generator, as one does. I only wanted to re-use the same template across multiple html files. Instead I created something accursed indeed.

I wrote a small program in C that generates C programs in PHP-like way. For example, for this input:

[#
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void) {
    for (int i = 0; i < 5; ++i) {
#]
        Iteration number <b>[# printf("%d", i); #]</b>
[#
    }
}
#]

#include <stdio.h>
int main(void) {
    for (int i = 0; i < 5; ++i) {
        printf("%s", "Iteration number <b>");
        printf("%d", i);
        printf("%s", "</b>\n");
    }
}

It's a very simple templating engine you see. Then I compile the resulting code and here's my page. I can include other pages via the C preprocessor's #include mechanism. Aand I also made a makefile. Surely this was easier than learning eleventy, right?..

I also implemented delimeters other than [# and #]. For instance, [@ ... @] make it so that the enclosed text is simply pasted in the preprocessed C source code as a string literal. And [$ ... $] generates a source code block, escaping html entities when necessary.

Here's the source code for this page.