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C++ try not to add footguns challenge (impossible)
(lemmy.world)
Alt text:
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
Woah, that's some meta shit. Neat. :D
It's pretty cool when you use it right but it's also really easy to shoot yourself in the foot with, even by C++ standards. For example, in other languages (I'm coming from Java/C# which both have it) it lets you access private/protected fields and methods when you normally wouldn't be able to.
There's also a noticeable performance penalty over large lists because you're searching for the field with a string instead of directly accessing it.
For the times it is necessary (usually serialization-adjacent or dynamic filtering/sorting in a table) to use reflection, it's faster at runtime than converting an object to a dictionary/hashmap. However, 99% of time it's a bad call.
If you look at the proposal, this is specifically "static reflection", i.e. compile-time reflection. So it doesn't actually have any of the downsides you mention, as far as I can tell.