Reflection?

[Sclytrack]

== Quote from Jonathan M Davis (jmdavisProg at gmx.com)'s article
> 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

 Maybe the xml data could be converted to some
 faster loadable format by a tool external to the compiler.


D---->xml---->runtime reflection library
D---->xml---->[binary files---->runtime reflection library]
D---->xml---->More D code.

C---->xml---->Wrappers in other languages.
C---->xml---->D binding code.

D------__traits()---->More D Code