• Sjoerd van Leent (27/27) Oct 01 2004 Hi all,
• Andy Friesen (15/28) Oct 01 2004 Maybe this needs to appear on a FAQ someplace. :) (if it doesn't

Sjoerd van Leent <svanleent wanadoo.nl> writes:

Hi all,

Within Enterprise systems it is quite handy to have reflection such as 
done in .NET and Java. Of course, D is more down to the system, but it 
could prove handy when using things like SOAP or CORBA. Since in D a 
class (and methods/templates etc.) are not capable of reflection 
immediatly (and this has a strong reason) I still think that there 
should be support for it, so one could easily make a SOAP, CORBA or 
other connection to and from D.

For this it may be nice to introduce a new keyword (actually an 
attribute) to be put in front of a class, method and perhaps template 
signature:





--- or ---









Enterprise systems in these days exist because of those techniques, but 
also XML invokers (which search methods/classes belonging to some 
element) could benefit from such a system.

Regards,
Sjoerd

Andy Friesen <andy ikagames.com> writes:

Sjoerd van Leent wrote:
 Hi all,
 
 Within Enterprise systems it is quite handy to have reflection such as 
 done in .NET and Java. Of course, D is more down to the system, but it 
 could prove handy when using things like SOAP or CORBA. Since in D a 
 class (and methods/templates etc.) are not capable of reflection 
 immediatly (and this has a strong reason) I still think that there 
 should be support for it, so one could easily make a SOAP, CORBA or 
 other connection to and from D.
 
 Enterprise systems in these days exist because of those techniques, but 
 also XML invokers (which search methods/classes belonging to some 
 element) could benefit from such a system.

Maybe this needs to appear on a FAQ someplace. :)  (if it doesn't 
already, that is)

There has never been any dispute that reflection is a good thing to 
have.  It's just not on the Right Now List. (as I understand it, the 
Right Now List is currently composed entirely of unfixed bugs)

With respect to the potential overhead inflicted by having this extra 
information exposed at runtime, it only needs to appear once per class, 
not instance, so it's pretty small in the long run.

I think the right thing to do would be to have a pragma to explicitly 
suppress this extra reflection information.  This way, it's more clear 
that it's a mere optimization, as opposed to an important concept of the 
language. (smarter compilers could ignore it in much the same way that 
most C++ compilers regard the 'inline' keyword as a mere hint)

  -- andy