I've done the same thing (well, generating java from python in this case) using str.format. - while it feels a bit wrong on some level, it's a lot easier to see whats going on than using an AST for instance. 2015-10-21T09:55:55.453Z+00:00 ... I recently developed a command-line tool for Jinja2 especially the code generation in mind. github... More on stackoverflow.com

I have made a command-line tool based on Jinja2 to do code generation. github.com/kblomqvist/yasha 2016-03-19T10:01:36.643Z+00:00 More on stackoverflow.com

I'd probably use metaclasses if I had the kind of problem where code generation could actually help. The last time I saw a project using code generation where I thought that it ought have to used metaclasses was a tool to generate python code from swagger descriptions. Django's ORM is a good example where metaclasses were used to good effect (there are very few of those). In general I'm extremely suspicious of anybody who claims to have the kind of problem that requires either metaclasses or code generation would help though. It is suitable only for problems that are very, very, very abstract (e.g. like an ORM or REST API interaction framework). In 90% of cases I've seen the person attempting to use it vastly overgeneralized the problem that they actually had in an attempt to prepare for future problems never arose. In the process of doing that they then created a code clusterfuck that was hellishly hard to understand and debug (and in some cases I was left to clean up the mess). It wasn't simple and it can't, intrinsically, ever be simple (there is some language theory behind this). I could be convinced otherwise by describing your problem, but right now I'm 80% convinced that what you have described is an XY problem and that you're attempting to do this because you overgeneralized your problem. If you describe the actual problem you're solving it might help. More on reddit.com

I don't tend to use code generators at all. Go does have some boilerplate but in terms of things like defining a simple data model, it doesn't have any more code than any equivalent language. I find most code generators fairly irritating most of the time. Better than a framework, which tends to turn into a straightjacket in a hurry, but still frustrating. I've personally never found Go to be particularly burdensome to write, maybe that's just because I come from static OOP languages like Java and C# which tend to have mountains of boilerplate. More on reddit.com