On 8/16/24 8:40 PM, Michalis Kamburelis via fpc-devel wrote:
If we could instead just put TVector3 in the published section, and make it exposed in the object inspector (maybe adding some additional code to use RTTI, but that is made *once*, not every time we need to expose TVector3) this would be great :)
Seconding this, for pretty much the same use case: my 3D game engine also uses TVector, etc records (and objects! - stuff being allocated in stack or "inline" other objects/classes is incredibly important) and needs to expose them via RTTI/published and i have to use various kludgy hacks to work around a language limitation that IMO was already questionable back in the 90s when Delphi 2 was released (i might kinda accept it for Delphi 1 having to work in 16bit mode :-P).
Instead of having a proxy object, i "flatten" the fields using getters and setters so, e.g., a "property Position: TVector read FPosition write SetPosition" in the public section also has "property PositionX: Single read GetPositionX write SetPositionX" and similar for PositionY and PositionZ. Obviously with something like "property Transformation: TTransformation read FTransformation write SetTransformation" which has Position, Rotation and Scale properties (as TVectors) that get flattened to nine published properties so they can be accessed via RTTI (and thus have automatic serialization, deserialization, property editing UI, clipboard copy/paste, undo/redo support via property diffs, etc without having to do all that manually via code) it becomes kinda unwieldy fast.
Sadly i also do have to use proxy objects in some cases, e.g. i have a generic object "TDynArray" for dynamic arrays which is wrapped via a "TSerializableCollection" class so that the serialization/deserialization code can automatically write/construct/read published collections of objects.
It'd be very useful if the Run-Time Type Information could describe all the Type Information the compiler already knows about :-P
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