- I think you are neglecting the aspect on how the user can choose the types that are going to be reflected. I believe not all types should have their metadata generated, at least to save on compile time on large projects. The way I did it in my preprocessor was using a pragma directive but it was much simpler than Mirror since it was only intended for classes. There migth be other ways, though, but it should be made more explicit. If reflection makes it into the standard, there shouldn't be any tools to generate the metadata besides the compiler. For the standard library, I guess that including a given header or using reflect operator would bring in the metadata.
Actually, this is one of my primary concerns. I also think that the way to go is not to reflect everything automatically, but to let the user to (somehow) choose what should be reflected. But i think that the process of "marking" namespaces, classes, etc. that should be reflected, should be decoupled from the declaration of the namespace, class, etc. because that would allow greater flexibility and also would allow to cherry-pick, what parts of 3rd-party libraries should be reflected in concrete applications based on their needs.
Since this is compile-time reflection, can't the compiler generate reflection metadata "on demand" (that is, whenever it is being queried) rather than the user having to explicitly mark classes as reflected, without any loss of efficiency? Regards, Nate