Interest in cpp-member-accessor?

From: Hans Dembinski (hans.dembinski_at_[hidden])
Date: 2023-02-06 09:22:06

Dear all,

Hubert Liberacki wrote this library 

https://github.com/hliberacki/cpp-member-accessor

that uses a loophole in the C++ standard which allows one to access private members and methods in classes in external libraries that are not under the control of the library author. Since the loophole is legal, it works with all major compilers and on all platforms. No special compiler flags required nor illegal macros like #define private public.

I think this should be integrated in Boost, is there interest other from myself?

Before you say it is evil, consider all the good that can be done with this in responsible hands. You can add serialisation support to classes that you do not control and you can write efficient Python bindings. I have used this library now in three projects. I used it to add serialisation support and to provide memory views of C++ structures in Python (via the Numpy module), both wouldn't have been possible to do or not would not have been efficient without this.

It is a single-header library with 85 lines of code, some of which are comments. This seems a bit small for a separate library, but I am not sure where it would fit in.

Best regards,
Hans