On 21-08-2011 15:13, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
On Sun, 21 Aug 2011 15:16:11 +0300, Jacob Carlborg <d...@me.com> wrote:
Yes, I know. But the point is to be able to do it without the use of
mixins. It needs to work with third party types, otherwise there no
use. It also needs to work when the static type is Object.
You're already paying for the class info, which already contains
getMembers. But this methods always returns an empty array and as far
as I can see, it's not possible to set/get fields or call methods via
these member instances.
I think the best way to do this is to improve compile-time reflection to
the point where it'd be possible to enumerate all declarations in a
module and create run-time reflection information for them - then you'd
just need to specify the modules for which you'd like run-time
reflection. One thing to note is that there are use cases where more
run-time information about a program's internals may not be desired,
e.g. with commercial closed-source applications, so this would need to
be optional.
I really don't think this is a valid cause of concern in this day and
age. Look at Java and .NET. They're doing just fine even with all
metadata being available. Plenty of commercial C++ products ship with
RTTI these days, too (AAA games, even).
What I mean to say is, I don't think we should let this "concern" hamper
runtime reflection in D, because it evidently is not as big of an issue
as people have made it out to be in the past. Security through obscurity
is bad, as the saying goes.
Regards,
Alex
