Re: [boost] [OT][RFC] standardized compile-time reflection

Subject: Re: [boost] [OT][RFC] standardized compile-time reflection
From: Matus Chochlik (chochlik_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-04-23 14:10:42

>> There are some ideas on how to solve this in the "Unresolved issues"
>> section but it is rather complicated:
>>
>> - If we allow everything to be reflected the compile-times would
>> be horrible, even worse if a run-time reflection facility was based
>> on this meta-data so would be the resulting executable size.
>>
>> - If we allow some sort of "white-listing" (i.e. specify what you want)
>> or "black-listing" (specify what you don't want) it would be inconvenient
>> for some use-cases.
>>
>> I'm a fan of the "white-list" approach, but I would like to hear your opinions
>> on this issue.
>
> Â Whitelisting seems appropriate. To make it more convenient, it would be
> nice to be able to white-list at different granularities - for example, an
> entire namespace (meaning all its contents), or just particular elements of
> a namespace.
>
> I also like the idea of separating the whitelisting from the definition of the
> namespace/class. For example, I may *want* to traverse all the elements
> of namespace std, so I should be able to whitelist it in my code only.
>

Yes it may be a legitimate use case to traverse everything and this
is where it would be annoying to have to re-specify everything so the
white list should allow to use some kind of wildcard even if only for
the "get everything" case.

The paper describes a tagging mechanism and IMHO some kind
of combination of white-listing and compile-time filtering based
on the user-specified predicates examining the tags and various
properties of the meta-data would be "best".

regards,

Matus