[jandrewrogers]

In modern C++, macros are a viewed as a code smell because they are strictly worse than alternatives in almost all situations. It is a cultural norm; it is a bit like using "unsafe" in Rust if not strictly required for some trivial case. The C++ language has made a concerted effort to eliminate virtually all use cases for macros since C++11 and replace them with type-safe first-class features in the language. It is a bit of a legacy thing at this point, there are large modern C++ codebases with no macros at all, not even for things like logging. While macros aren't going away, especially in older code, the cultural norm in modern C++ has tended toward macros being a legacy foot-gun and best avoided if at all possible.

The main remaining use case for the old C macro facility I still see in new code is to support conditional compilation of architecture-specific code e.g. ARM vs x86 assembly routines or intrinsics.

[sgerenser]

But how would one conditionally enable or disable the “final” keyword on class members without a preprocessor macro, even in C++23?

[jandrewrogers]

Macros are still useful for conditional compilation, as in this case. They've been sunsetted for anything that looks like code generation, which this isn't. I was more commenting on the reflexive "ick" reaction of the author to the use of macros (even when appropriate) because avoiding them has become so engrained in C++ culture. I'm a macro minimalist but I would use them here.

Many people have a similar reaction to the use of "goto", even though it is absolutely the right choice in some contexts.