Create an Plugin Framework so Developers can plug-in arbitrary code-generation
features
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Key: THRIFT-163
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-163
Project: Thrift
Issue Type: New Feature
Reporter: Nathan Marz
It would be really nice to be able to plug in arbitrary code-generation
extensions to the Thrift compiler. There are a lot of application-specific
problems that can be elegantly solved by augmenting the Thrift compiler. For
example, in my application, I need to be able to find all instances of an
object of a certain type reachable from a Thrift object. (Java reflection is
too expensive). I doubt that the community would accept this is a feature
within the core compiler, but if I could do it via my own extension that would
be ideal.
There are a number of steps that need to happen to make this work:
1. Create an interface that extensions implement - this could be as simple as
one method called "generate_body" which is called within the class definition.
This allows extensions to create field declarations and new methods. Possibly
we might need a "generate_constructor" if the extension needs to do anything in
the object's constructor.
2. Create a way for the compiler to dynamically load extension modules - I'm
not that familiar with how to do this in C++. We might need a configuration
file for each module which specifies what language it generates for.
I think one of the main objections to this will be robustness - how do we
ensure that extensions don't conflict with one another or with the Thrift
compiler itself? I would propose that we take the Firefox route to addressing
this and don't worry about it. It should be up to the extensions designed to
choose sufficiently good method and field names to prevent conflicts.
Thoughts?
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