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While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2015 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Reflection Techniques in C++

by Paul Fultz II

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Reflection is a very powerful and useful feature used in many languages to achieve things like serialization, object-relationship mapping, and general data-driven development. C++ doesn't support reflection natively in the language yet. There are proposals to add compile-time reflection to the language, but C++ has survived all this time without direct support for reflection.

This talk will discuss the various techniques the can be used to achieve reflection including boost fusion, the visitor patter, and do-it-yourself with some macros and metaprogramming. This talk will discuss how these techniques can be used to implement serialization or object-relational mapping.