I always thought of parser generators as a DSL in disguise. There should be no need for parser generators to generate code for high-level languages. It should be quite easy to write a library that does the same thing and does not complicate the build cycle.

Haskell's parser combinators (and its python cousins) are great examples of it.

But, if you need C as the target language for portability reasons they might be the right tool for the job.