A screenshot from the linked article titled "Reflection in C++26", showing reflection as one of the bullet points listed in the "Core Language" section

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[–] Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 month ago (9 children)

I can see the footguns, but I can also see the huge QoL improvement - no more std::enable_if spam to check if a class type has a member, if you can just check for them.

... at least I hope it would be less ugly than std::enable_if.

[–] Zangoose@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

There's a pretty big difference though. To my understanding enable_if happens at compile time, while reflection typically happens at runtime. Using the latter would cause a pretty big performance impact over a (large) list of data.

[–] Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Wouldn't compilers be able to optimize runtime things out? I know that GCC does so for some basic RTTI things, when types are known at compile time.

[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

For runtime reflection, no, you'd specifically be able to do things that would be impossible to optimize out.

But the proposal is actually for static (i.e. compile-time) reflection anyway, so the original performance claim is wrong.

[–] Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

Yeah, that's what I was thinking of. I don't know how C++ could reasonably have Java-like reflections anyway...

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