Comments on: C++ Runtime Type System

By: avi

avi — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:49:12 +0000

Hi Nash, you’re correct that those two functions are missing from this implementation. I focused mostly on serialization/marshaling and less on dynamic accessors. Printing the structure is a stone’s throw from printing the structures properly formatted values to a stream, and the reverse.

The dynamic accessors wouldn’t hard to add though, mainly just add a map or dictionary for quickly finding children, and I’d go with some sort of C++-like dot notation for representing parent paths as if they were compiled C++. I’ve done this for other systems in the past.

That said, I think the bigger hole is on method invocation.

By: Nash

Nash — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 20:31:12 +0000

What I don’t understand today is, what do you do with this information?
You can print out a class structure, and now?
Or is the interesting part misssing?
Like: getProperty(string name) setProperty etc…

By: Avi

Avi — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 06:48:58 +0000

Nash, if the getter/setter exists for each reflected member, it’s easy to infer the name and type of it (e.g., int Get_Foo() ).

However, you still need a runtime pointer to the function, which you could probably get in the macro that adds each member type and pass in. (e.g., get pointer-to-function Class##::Get_##Member##() ), where Class and Member are the class and member names passed in. )

The main problem is these would be member functions most likely, not static, so you’d need to be a bit fancier about handling storage and invocation.

Not sure about why std::string wouldn’t work, but it might have to do with the macro concatenation tricks i use perhaps not liking colons.

By: C++ reflection: extract type inheritance information with code postprocessing | The LIBPF blog

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 18:14:41 +0000

[...] macros: such as here; the latter two are a little obtrusive because they deviate from standard C++ [...]

By: nash

nash — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 08:13:35 +0000

using the type std::string as attribute, won’t work with your system. I get a linking error. To big to post it here.

I think in real worl apps it’s more important to reflect the getter/setter, rather then the private member variables.
How could I achive this with your system?

By: avi

avi — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 06:32:26 +0000

Thanks. std::string is pretty portable nowadays. But it’s easy to replace. I tend to not use const char* too much these days because it’s just too prone to bugs.

By: Jurgen

Jurgen — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 06:31:25 +0000

Hi,

I noted that in the Type class you use std::string for storing the name of the class/member. Why not just use const char* ? to make the RTTI system more independent?

Overall a nice, simple and powerful little system.

By: RealityPrime » A Nearly-Automatic C++ Run-Time Type System

RealityPrime » A Nearly-Automatic C++ Run-Time Type System — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 04:22:00 +0000

[...] Updated here [...]