Reflection-Driven Development in Pure C: Eliminating Boilerplate at Scale

Pure C provides absolute hardware control but lacks native runtime reflection, leading to endless boilerplate for ECS, serialization, and UI bindings. This article explores "Reflection Driven Development" (RDD)—how to build a standalone, custom code generator in C using libclang. By parsing simple macro annotations, we can automatically extract AST data and generate strictly typed, debuggable C code, keeping compilation blazing fast without relying on bloated C++ plugins