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. 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.) I'm not sure if the version of Boost.Reflection in the Sandbox contains the inheritance code. If not, I'll just need to make sure I have unit tests together for it and then I'll submit it. Given the normal speed of C++ evolution, I expect to wait quite a while before being able to write multi-methods. Jeremy On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 3:17 PM, Jean-Louis Leroy <jl@yorel.be> wrote:
Jeremy Pack wrote:
Jean-Louis, Boost.Reflection handles multiple and virtual inheritance fine.
Does the version from http://boost-extension.blogspot.com/2008/07/latest-release-downloadable.html... support for inheritance already?
My primary interest is not in reflection per se, for me it's just a tool upon which one can build generic object-processing tools like dumping objects to text descriptions or XML or implementing object-relational mapping.
Once we have reflection, we need a way to deal with fields in a generic manner, whatever their type: int, vector<int>, vector< vector<int> > etc. One solution is to reflect the structure of the field's type as well: make the field class contain a pointer to a polymorphic type object, from which one derives int_type, a vector_type - which contains in turn a pointer to the element's type - etc. Pattern freaks will call it a composite ;-)
The next step is multimethods. Once we have them we can write code like this:
// using BS's proposed syntax in D&E void process_type(virtual type&, virtual processor&, void*);
void process(instance i, processor& p) for each field (i) process_type(*field->type, p, field->address(i))
class text_dumper : public processor { ... };
void process_type(virtual int_type& t, virtual text_processor& p, char* pv) { p << *reinterpret_cast<int*>(pv); }
void process_type(virtual vector_type& t, virtual text_processor& p, char* pv) { p.indent(); char *iter = t.begin(pv), last = t.end(pv); while (iter != last) { process_type(t.element_type, p, iter); t.forward(iter); } p.outdent(); }
What do you think of the idea?
Jean-Louis
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