Time for std.reflection

[Michel Fortin]

On 2012-07-21 21:44:51 +0000, Andrei Alexandrescu 
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> said:

> Please chime in with thoughts.

Unifying runtime and compile-time reflection is a good idea, in theory 
at least. At least it'd make compile-time reflection easier. But when I 
think about the use case, unification the way you're proposing doesn't 
seem that great.

If you need runtime reflection in one class, you probably need it on 
all the derived classes too. That's the real problem runtime reflection 
solves: it allows you to know something about the subclasses you might 
otherwise not know about (because your code only know the base class).

So to make runtime reflection not a hassle, the thing that generates 
the runtime reflection info should be inherited somehow.

The other thing is: you very rarely need runtime reflection of 
everything. Especially, why would you ever need runtime reflection for 
a struct, where all the reflected info is available at compile time? 
And why create info for all fields and methods in a class in a case 
where all you need to get at is a pair of serialize/unserialize 
functions?


-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.ca
http://michelf.ca/