How We Manage Portability and Configuration with the C Preprocessor

An in-depth investigation of C preprocessor usage for portability and configuration management is presented. Three heavily-ported and widely used C++ libraries are examined. A core set of header files responsible for configuration management is identified in each system. Then macro usage is extracted and analyzed both manually and with the help of program analysis tools. The configuration structure of each library is discussed in details and commonalities between the systems, including conventions and patterns are discussed. A common configuration architecture for managing portability concerns is derived and presented.