Re: [Boost-users] Boost-enabled loosely coupled ORM serialization

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] Boost-enabled loosely coupled ORM serialization
From: Dominique Devienne (ddevienne_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-04-05 06:51:48

On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 11:19 AM, Michael Powell <mwpowellhtx_at_[hidden]>wrote:

> Sounds like a tall order I know. Call me spoiled on the "niceness" of
> .NET, Reflection, and so on. More likely I'm getting reacquainted with the
> practicalities of using a paradigm-rich language like C++11. Now back to
> the "real world" what the rest of us deal with.
>

Indeed. I'm facing similar issues. I've introduced ad-hoc introspection,
but doing the reflection part right, in a typesafe manner, which plays nice
with aggregate C++ types which expand into several SQL columns (with C++ to
SQL type transformations in the middle), or which play nice with
polymorphic foreign-keys (which can also expand to several columns if
modeled using XARC), is currently out-of-reach for us, worked-around by
lots of ad-hoc code again. The introspection part at least helps with SQL
schema management and statement SQL text generation, but without reflection
of lot must be spelled out in explicit code.

I'm aware of some high-voodoo template-based introspection libraries in the
boost sandbox or announced on the list, but haven't used them, as they tend
to be too "templat'y" to be accepted in my organization. I don't know if
any actually provides reflection. Adding introspection and reflection as a
library feature tend to yield complex and slow to compile code it seems,
compared to what a language feature could provide, and almost always
involves lots of macros too. But I'm getting off track here. Hopefully this
thread can provides interesting nuggets of wisdom on this subject. --DD