[cb321]

While C macros are limited, you underestimate their range. You can absolutely create specialized swaps without typeof (not part of the C preprocessor, incidentally), and the CTL which I linked to even has one. You just tell the macro the name of the type. And you can just invoke swap_ref or something if you want a more indirect one. There's no overloading. So, yeah, you need to know what you are operating upon, or abstract qualities thereof.

Sure, the use of these things in C is (usually) a bit more verbose/burdensome than C++. The misleading statements were performance-oriented, not syntactic sugar-oriented, and I already granted exception optimization. (Some folks, like Go/Rust authors, would tell you exceptions are bad anyway.)