[oldiob]

In my point of view, there's a difference between abstraction created by the language, e.g. lambdas or virtual table in C++, and abstraction created by the programmers via the CPP.

The former is compiler dependent and you cannot know how it's implemented. The former is simple text substitution and you're the one implementing it. I often find myself creating small embedded languages in CPP for making abstraction, and I know exactly what C code it's going to generate and thus the penalty if there's any.

People that are afraid of the preprocessor simply don't understand how powerful it's in good hands.