On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 3:54 AM, Christian Hergert <
[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> I'm curious about how people feel about adding a feature for custom
> attributes/decorators that can be used for meta-programming. If that
> doesn't make sense, let me show an example of what I would like to
> make possible.
>
> ...
>
> Does this sound interesting to anyone? Should I file an enhancement
> request?
>
>
Well it surely does to me. However, which approach would benefit the most?
Custom attributes could be
a. available at compile-time. A plugin/gmodule for valac would be used to
process them (generate code, in your case).
b. available at runtime, the Flex way. The mxmlc just stores your custom
attributes which can be inspected at runtime with describeType's XML [1][2]
c. available at runtime, the Java way. The custom attributes are just
interfaces from your code, further present in
type.getAnnotations/method.getAnnotations
For b. and c., I don't have any workable idea how this could be implemented
with the existing GObjects (maybe something like comments?[3] )
I think the most flexible way is a., since from there you could implement b.
or c.
That said, I would prefer a).
One more question though: should it be possible to annotate existing classes
from other libraries? In C# you could do something like:
[MyAnnotation]
public partial class ExistingClass {}
(if ExistingClass is part of your code, but it's autogenerated and you don't
want to modify the generated source each time)
[1]
http://coenraets.org/blog/2007/10/annotating-actionscript-classes-with-custom-metadata-simple-orm-framework-for-air/
[2]
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/2/langref/flash/utils/package.html#describeType%28%29
[3] http://live.gnome.org/GObjectIntrospection/Annotations
Regards,
Vlad
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