[boost] Re: GUI Library Proposal for a Proposal

From: Russell Hind (rh_gmane_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-11-12 02:08:52

Edward Diener wrote:
> 
> That is very true, thanks for bringing it up as it butresses my argument
> that headers may not be good enough. However, practically PIMPL is normally
> used to encapsulate private information and design time programming will not
> care about that information, only about public properties and events.
> 

Yes, C++Builder works because the information you can set at design time 
(and therefore would be a candidate for parsing) is in the __published: 
section of a class which is basically public: except the compiler 
generates the reflection information for it.

Regarding parsing, pre-processors could be used with correct compilation 
options to help generate accurate information, but I guess that wouldn't 
help the case where people have separate compilation options for 
different source files that would affect the layout of a header file.

Have you looked at wxWidgets runtime type information stuff?  What I'm 
thinking of would only provide the same information as that, but without 
the need for every class you want to have runtime reflection available 
for, you don't need to put all the members/member functions in defines.

Cheers

Russell