Re: [boost] Reflection?

Subject: Re: [boost] Reflection?
From: Jean-Francois Bastien (jfbastien_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-11-04 06:00:50

Jean-Louis,

> > What you want to do would require storing a great deal of extra 
> > information, in addition to that stored by Boost.Reflection. Since
one 
> > of my primary emphases is performance, I doubt that my library is an

> > ideal framework upon which to build what you propose. I would
imagine 
> > though that much of the code could be very useful to you.
> 
> Is it so? It's just one extra pointer per field.
> 
> Hmm. For what I have in mind I also need to ask to a class what its
subclasses are...
> 
> > Have you looked at GCCXML? It could very well give you much of the 
> > functionality that you desire (class names, function names and 
> > signatures, types with data etc.)
> 
> It looks nice but it's gcc-specific. Currently I use MS Visual Express
2008.

Have a look at the CERN's Reflex library (part of the ROOT library):
http://root.cern.ch/

We use it extensively here, I think it's more powerful than what you ask
for. It's based on GCCXML for parsing, uses Python scripts to generate
C++ code that's compiled into your application/DLL. A bit like
boost::python with pygccxml, but a bit less clean.

It's got a few quirks, but it works pretty well. We're using it on
Visual Studio-only projects, so GCCXML isn't a problem.

JF