On 2012-07-21 21:44:51 +0000, Andrei Alexandrescu
<seewebsiteforem...@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.for...@michelf.ca
http://michelf.ca/
