Function pointer from mangled name at runtime?

[bitwise via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 1 September 2017 at 20:27:45 UTC, Jonathan Marler 
wrote:

> Symbol table is usually used to mean the compiler symbol table, 
> so I'm assuming you mean the "export table" in your binary that 
> contains all the exported symbols.  The executable will have an 
> entry for those manged getRTInfo functions so long as they are 
> exported.  I don't think I've ever used the "export" keyword in 
> a D program but it appears it exists and could be used to put 
> symbols in your export table so they could be looked up at 
> runtime.

Yes, export table. It seems that right now, 'export' is 
equivalent to __declspec(export) on windows. On linux, it likely 
has no effect to due all symbols being exported by default on 
those platforms. I forget how exactly, but I think DIP22 changes 
this situation.


> You would also need to know type information, not just the name 
> itself. If you had a name like mine.A.B.Test, then you would 
> need to know what A, B, and Test are, are they modules, 
> classes, structs, enums, etc

True..didn't think of that =/
And this would be problematic, because my intentions were to use 
this for deserialization, where all you have is a string that's 
supposed to be a fully qualified type.

> I don't know what problem you're trying to solve here, but I 
> will say that it appears you may be going about it in the wrong 
> way. If you would like to share the real problem you are trying 
> to solve I could take a stab at recommending a possibly simpler 
> solution.

Basically, the problem is deserializing a scene-graph from a json 
text file. The architecture of my scene-graph enforces that some 
template-function will be instantiated for every symbol that is 
reflected. So what I'm trying to avoid is having to store all of 
the instantiated type information in a central repository.

Imagine I gave you a static library, and a json file, and I told 
you that all the necessary symbols to deserialize that json file 
were in that static lib. If we both had the same serialization 
library that was used, you would be able to deserialize the json 
file without me giving you any source, or having you register all 
the needed types yourself in some centralized type library.

    That's the dream.