Flavours of Reflection -- Bernard Teo
Reflection is coming to C++26 and is arguably the most anticipated feature accepted into this version of the standard. With substantial implementation work already done in Clang and GCC, compile-time reflection in C++ is no longer theoretical — it’s right around the corner.
Flavours of Reflection: Comparing C++26 reflection with similar capabilities in other programming languages
by Bernard Teo
From the article:
Reflection is imminent. It is set to be part of C++26, and it is perhaps the most anticipated feature accepted into this version of the standard. Lots of implementation work has already been done for Clang and GCC — they pretty much already work (both are on Compiler Explorer), and it hopefully won’t be too long before they get merged into their respective compilers.
Many programming languages already provide some reflection capabilities, so some people may think that C++ is simply playing catch-up. However, C++’s reflection feature does differ in important ways. This blog post explores the existing reflection capabilities of Python, Java, C#, and Rust, comparing them with one another as well as with the flavour of reflection slated for C++26.
In the rest of this blog post, the knowledge of C++ fundamentals is assumed (but not for the other programming languages, where non-commonsensical code will be explained).