The most useful user-made C-macros (in GCC, also C99)? [closed]

Answer 1

Pack bytes,words,dwords into words,dwords and qwords:

#define ULONGLONG unsigned __int64
#define MAKEWORD(h,l) ((unsigned short) ((h) << 8)) | (l)
#define MAKEDWORD(h,l) ((DWORD) ((h) << 16)) | (l)
#define MAKEQWORD(h,l) ((ULONGLONG)((h) << 32)) | (l) 

Parenthesizing arguments it's always a good practice to avoid side-effects on expansion.

Answer 2

also multi-type Minimum and Maximum like that

//NOTE: GCC extension !
#define max(a,b) ({typeof (a) _a=(a); typeof (b) _b=(b); _a > _b ? _a:_b; })
#define min(a,b) ({typeof (a) _a=(a); typeof (b) _b=(b); _a < _b ? _a:_b; })

Answer 3

Checking whether a floating point x is Not A Number:

#define ISNAN(x) ((x) != (x))

Answer 4

TRUE and FALSE seem to be popular.

Answer 5

for-each loop in C99:

#define foreach(item, array) \
    for(int keep=1, \
            count=0,\
            size=sizeof (array)/sizeof *(array); \
        keep && count != size; \
        keep = !keep, count++) \
      for(item = (array)+count; keep; keep = !keep)

int main() {
  int a[] = { 1, 2, 3 };
  int sum = 0;
  foreach(int const* c, a)
    sum += *c;
  printf("sum = %d\n", sum);

  // multi-dim array
  int a1[][2] = { { 1, 2 }, { 3, 4 } };
  foreach(int (*c1)[2], a1)
    foreach(int *c2, *c1) 
      printf("c2 = %d\n", *c2);
}

Answer 6

One (of the very few) that I use regularly is a macro to declare an argument or variable as unused. The most compatible solution to note this (IMHO) varies by compiler.