Reflection of the present and the future

For many developers, implementing serialization is a pain. You can avoid this pain by waiting for the reflection to be accepted in the C++ standard, but this is a long process. By popularizing the topic of reflection, we can give a slight acceleration to this process, attract people who are able to point out shortcomings or make suggestions.

In the course of the talk, we will get acquainted with the syntactic constructions from the P1717 proposal to the C ++ standard and with its implementation (a fork of clang). Almost all of the code shown can be built on this fork. The introduction will revolve around the implementation of a series of relevant tasks: serialization of aggregates, serialization of JSON, serialization of Protobuf (we'll get rid of the proto compiler saving the API using a metaclass), improving GMock. Thanks to this choice of tasks, we'll be able to see a clear line between static and dynamic reflection, as well as the limits of applicability of this technology.