A Trick for Reflection in C++ |

Yesterday I got into the following problem. I want to allow certain C++ struct definitions in my code to be reflectively inspected. For example, if I defined a struct S with two int fields a and b, the other parts of my program should be able to know that the struct S contains such two fields with such definitions and can act upon this information.

Trivially, one can solve this problem by maintaining two pieces of code: the original definition and a map like { 'a': 'int', 'b': 'int'}. But then the two pieces of code must be manually kept in sync, which is the point I want to avoid.

Such use case is known as reflection. Unfortunately the C++ standard does not have native support for reflection. There are paper proposals to support it, but none of the major compilers seem to have implemented them yet.

The problem can also be solved via a huge hack called “the C++ Type Loophole”. However, it’s unclear why the hack could work, and it’s so hacky that even the C++ standard committee has reached a decision that it should be prohibited. So I’m not brave enough to use this hack.

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