Reflection?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Sunday 24 October 2010 12:17:47 Sclytrack wrote:
> Instead of targeting doc files, could dmd create xml files
> for the purpose of runtime reflection, instead of trying to
> go to runtime reflection via __traits.
> 
> You can archive these files together with the binary code.
> Create some sort of D package.
> 
> I mean C (GNOME) is going with xml files for their introspection.
> http://library.gnome.org/devel/gi/unstable/gi-gir-reference.html

__traits isn't runtime reflection. It's compile time reflection. It's highly 
useful in creating templates and string mixins and the like.

If you want runtime reflection, it's possible to use __traits to put together a 
set of functions which hold the traits information to be queried at runtime, 
thereby creating your own runtime reflection mechanism (I think that someone 
around here has a project which does exactly that actually), but there is no 
runtime reflection built into D.

If you wanted to, you could write code which would produce xml files that held 
type information which could be read at runtime, but again, since there is no 
runtime reflection in D, you'd have to do it yourself. Not to mention, reading 
XML is not exactly very efficient given that you'd be both reading a file and 
having to deal with parsing text, so I don't know why you'd generally want to 
use XML to hold type information. XML has its uses, but usually I'd think that 
you'd want runtime reflection to be efficient, and XML isn't going to do that.

- Jonathan M Davis