On 9/4/16 2:37 PM, David Nadlinger wrote:
On Sunday, 4 September 2016 at 12:33:07 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Thanks for answering. Yes, we really need introspection of private
members. One way or another we need to support that.
Do we, though? It's easy to state a general claim like this, but I find
it hard to actually justify.
Static introspection is by far the most powerful feature of D. The last
thing to do with it is hamstring it with nonsense like private :o).
Quoting elsethread:
There are a few cases I can think of:
* Serialization and deserialization, shallow and deep. These would need access
to the object layout, and possibly field names too (for cross-checking and
versioning purposes).
* Binary saving, loading, and fixup (a subset of serialization/deserialization)
- that thing when you copy raw memory to a file and then load it raw and fix
pointers up.
* Memory management and garbage collection: access to field types allows
efficient generic tracing.
* Database interfacing, automated binding, object-relational mapping, etc. It
stands to reason that field names would be needed and fields would be private,
yet the database loader does have access to them.
Of course the more important applications are those I can't yet imagine. The
way I see it introspection must have full power and unfettered access. So
definitely it must be able to pass through regular protection.
Andrei
