The point of runtime reflection is not your own code, that's the thing.
By having opt-in reflection, you are at the mercy that every single
component, every piece of code, every library, that you did not write,
the author decided to enable reflection. It is an unreasonable assumption.
On 25/10/2011 11:44 PM, Robert Jacques wrote:
I understand that at times when serialization has to break
encapsulation. My opinion though, is that classes should have to opt in,
before the serializer goes ahead and breaks their carefully designed
encapsulation. i.e. someone should have to code review the class to make
sure everything is kosher. For code you are developing, this is as
simple and straightforward as adding a single mixin statement to the class.
It is the responsibility of the one using your code to determine whether
they want take the risk and access private members.
Sometimes, it's needed. I have used private methods in production code
when programming in .NET, just because the developers of it did not
realize that something that's private would be useful to some people. It
saved many, many, hours of pain and effort of rolling your own solution.
If I upgrade the app to a newer version of .NET and the code breaks,
that's the risk that was taken. Presumably the person accessing these
things the author did not intend has taken steps to ensure it doesn't
break if things change (or doesn't intend to link to a newer version of
the library).
