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C compilers are not built for that (aside from perhaps GCC, which is more enlightened in this respect), but I have no problems with doing that to my Lisp compilers. Also, just because you're targeting higher-level programming does't mean you're targeting people who don't understand programming. Maybe you simply want to make things easier for yourself? The bigger the problem you're solving is, the more likely it is that raising the level of abstraction will save you a lot of work.

I'm the main author of MELT (the GCC plugin). I am not aware of any related software named MetaMELT. Do you have any references please? Regards.
Basile STARYNKEVITCH email: basile at starynkevitch dot net

I completely agree.

However, that doesn't mean I think Quartz or whatever Windows uses is better. Some of the alternatives that are miles better, but unfortunately didn't catch on simply because they were a bit too late include Sun's NeWS and Plan 9's /dev/draw.

Of course NeWS had interesting ideas (but wasn't opensource, so died).

The Berlin server could have been an interesting alternative. Unfortunately, it seems stalled, and the design around CORBA might be wrong. I definitely think that a GUI server should be protocol based (like PicoGUI and X11)!

An alternative could be to write a widget server running under X11. I actually did code (under GPL) such a stuff see Guis and Guis page for details and downloading. Please send me any feedbacks!

Guis's main ideas are: requests from client to GUIS are on a pipe, carrying Lua script for GTK2. replies from GUIS to client are either XML or Lispy syntax.

Xemacs might claim to be (also) a widget server.

Actually, I also think that the current widgets available in toolkits are unappropriate. I am missing a generic structured editor widget (able to edit generic syntax trees, perhaps with an XML representation).

• that kind of thing was one of the original goals for Java (long before it had that name)- the platform independent bytecode could modify to wherever the user was, reducing the back&forth needed to the server for simple GUI navigation. (It wasn't a bad idea, but even after ten years of hardware improvements, Java GUIs still lag in the performance and integration aspects).
  
• Also, the idea of a "layer on top of X" sounds a lot like GTK or QT. Or fltk, or wxWindows, or dozens of other things for that matter.
  
• Getting into your details, though, it sounds a lot like GUIS. The focus of GUIS is running the same system, not across a network (but that could probably work). But it does address problems like keeping the program running across Xserver restarts.

The GNU HURD and
the VSTa systems are both GPL-ed systems which did borrow some ideas from Plan9.

Basile STARYNKEVITCH