Code review: JSON unmarshaller

[Dan]

On Monday, 15 October 2012 at 20:35:34 UTC, Tyler Jameson Little 
wrote:
> I'm basically trying to reproduce other JSON marshallers, like 
> Go's, but using compile-time reflection. Go uses runtime 
> reflection, which D notably does not support. I like the idea 
> of compile-time reflection better anyway. There are a few 
> things that would make it easier (like a __traits call like 
> allMembers that excludes functions).
>
> I use a lot of JSON, so a JSON marshaller/unmarshaller is going 
> to save a lot of time, and make my code a lot cleaner.
>

I like Go's JSON convenience as well. There is a nice feature 
where you can add attributes to the members that are then 
available at runtime and therefore used by the serializer. So you 
could have:
------
type AcquiredRetired struct {
     Acquired tvm.Date `bson:"a"`
     Retired tvm.Date `bson:"r"`
}
------
Here it specifies a shortened key for bson, but you can do the 
same for json. The size benefit can be significant. A design 
choice they made is to only serialize members that are 
capitalized which means visible.

There is a nice json serialize/deserialize library in vibed.

When I throw this struct at your marshalJSON I get compile errors.

----------
import std.stdio;
struct X {
   class D {
     string b = "B";
   }
   string a = "A";
   D d;
}
void main() {
   auto c = new X();
   auto o = marshalJSON(c);
   writeln(o);
}
----------
Thanks
Dan