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cv5005 13 minutes ago [-]
Never quite understood why people are so obsessed with meta programming capabilities in a language, be it templates, comptime, macros, whatever.
I program mostly in C, if I need 'meta' programming I just write another C program that processes C source code (I've written a simple C parser), then in my build script I build in two stages, build meta program, run it, build rest of program.
Simple, effective, debuggable (the meta program is just normal C), infinite capabilities - can nest this to arbitritary depths, need meta-meta programming? Make a program that generates a meta program.
ironman1478 5 minutes ago [-]
Meta programming in C++ can enable you to remove lots of runtime branching in your code at the cost binary size.
miguel_martin 1 hours ago [-]
I agree with some other's in this thread: this is example is not great, but I get why it was used: to compare with X-macros. How about something that would require code-generation e.g. via libclang?
My guess is: libclang is more suited for this situation if you care about compile times, even if Python is used.
sagacity 10 hours ago [-]
Oof, that first example (the idiomatic C++26 way) looks so foreign if you're mostly used to C++11.
delegate 4 hours ago [-]
I was very curious to see what C++ 26 brings to the table, since I haven't used C++ in a while.
When I saw the 'no boilerplate' example, the very first thought that came to my mind:
This is the ugliest, most cryptic and confusing piece of code I've ever seen.
Calling this 'no boilerplate' is an insult to the word 'boilerplate'.
Yeah, I can parse it for a minute or two and I mostly get it.
But if given the choice, I'd choose the C-macro implementation (which is 30+ years old) over this, every time. Or the good old switch case where I understand what's going on.
I understand that reflection is a powerful capability for C++, but the template-meta-cryptic-insanity is just too much to invite me back to this version of the language.
SuperV1234 4 hours ago [-]
It is "cryptic" and "ugly" to you just because you're not familiar with it. You'd pick the macro-based implementation because you are familiar with it.
Seeing this argumentation is so tiresome, because it feels like there is a lack of self-awareness regarding what is "familiar" and what isn't, which is subconsciously translated to "ugly" and "bad".
delegate 4 hours ago [-]
Have you ever used other (modern) programming languages ?
In a lot of languages, you achieve the same with 1 line of code. It's not about familiarity, it's about the fact that it's a long and convoluted incantation to get the name of an enum.
Why do I have to be familiar with all those weird symbols just to do a trivial thing ?
Update:
Zig:
const Color = enum { red, green, blue };
const name = @tagName(Color.red); // "red"
Rust:
#[derive(Display)]
enum Color { Red, Green, Blue }
let name = Color::Red.to_string(); // "Red"
Clojure:
(name :red) => "red"
SuperV1234 3 hours ago [-]
C++:
enum Color { red, green, blue };
auto name = to_enum_string(Color::Red); // "Red"
shooly 2 hours ago [-]
... and where does that `to_enum_string` come from exactly? It doesn't seem to be built-in, which is the point of the parent comment.
SuperV1234 43 minutes ago [-]
It's a fair comparison. The parent comment isn't showing the compiler source code for the built-in reflection mechanisms.
You won't have to care about ^^ and [:X:] if you just want to consume reflection-based utils, which was the whole point of my comment.
randusername 6 hours ago [-]
I was a fool to assume that the same forces shaping the ugliness of C++ syntax would not also be at work in C++ 26.
ginko 7 hours ago [-]
Is it? I'm mostly used to (pre-)C++11 and the only unusual operators I see are ^^T (which I presume accesses the metadata info of T) and [:e:] (which I assume somehow casts the enumerator metadata 'e' to a constant value of T).
And template for but I assume that's like inline for like in zig.
CamouflagedKiwi 6 hours ago [-]
requires is also new (not sure exactly when that appeared, it's after the last time I wrote C++ in anger) although I think it's fairly clear what it means. I can only guess at the other two.
Not familiar with Zig but AFAICT `inline for` is about instructing the compiler to unroll the loop, whereas `template for` means it can be evaluated at compile time and each loop iteration can have a different type for the iteration variable. It's a bit crazy but necessary for reflection to work usefully in the way the language sets it up.
You realize c++11 is closer in age to C++98 than C++26?
w4rh4wk5 7 hours ago [-]
I've been wondering about debug-ability of code using reflection. X-Macros are quite annoying to step through in most debuggers, though possible. While the code in the first example is evaluated fully at compile-time, how would you approach debugging it?
theICEBeardk 8 minutes ago [-]
The answer is being debated at the moment in c++ papers and building on experience from other languages with extensive compile time evaluators like D. One thing that is happening is that we will get compile time exceptions (a paper for that is aiming to add this to the language in c++29 has come out) which may help us in reporting problems. Which will be important as there is also a lot of papers and talk about an extension of reflection allowing for better output generation which as far as I know was deferred until reflection had been accepted.
But there is also good news that with the advent of JIT like components for compile time evaluation in progress and the like of CLion having the beginnings of a compile debugger in combination with concepts there is a chance some help is available and on the way.
However right now you have to rely on compiler errors and static_asserts which is not ideal of course.
SuperV1234 4 hours ago [-]
Nothing that makes it straightforward. Testing via `static_assert` is a good strategy, but it's not debugging. I believe there are some ways of printing custom diagnostics during compilation, but I am not aware of any step-by-step debugging tool that runs at compile-time.
In practice, I haven't really needed to ever debug `consteval` functions -- it's quite easy to get the right behavior down thanks to `static_assert`-based testing and thanks to the fact that they do not depend on external state (simpler).
cenamus 6 hours ago [-]
I mean it's still C++ that's compiled and executed, surely the compiler would be able to provide a way to hook into that?
usefulcat 5 hours ago [-]
I don't recall the source, but I don't believe most (any?) c++ compilers implement compile-time code evaluation by compiling and running code.
For one thing they are required to disallow all undefined behavior for compile time execution, and some forms of UB only occur when the code is run.
varispeed 2 hours ago [-]
Why people are still using debuggers?
I never felt the need for them when doing TDD.
jsd1982 5 hours ago [-]
I think the conclusion section should indicate that they are based entirely on GCC 16's behavior and current implementation. We should avoid generalizing one compiler's behavior and performance. Curious how this same test would behave once clang ships C++26 reflection.
SuperV1234 4 hours ago [-]
I explicitly mentioned that GCC 16.1 was the compiler used in the benchmarking section, do you think I also need to add a disclaimer in the conclusion section as well?
Regardless, I don't think things are going to differ much with Clang. Without PCH/modules, standard header inclusion is still the "slow part" of C++ compilation, regardless of the compiler used and the standard library used (libstdc++ vs libc++). `#include` is fundamentally the same on any modern compiler.
Because the reflection feature itself seems quite fast on GCC (compared to the cost of the header), I predict the results will be similar on Clang as well.
bluGill 5 hours ago [-]
I was thinking the same thing. Modules are still not widely used, it is a reasonable guess that there are a lot of optimization opportunities left.
SuperV1234 4 hours ago [-]
That is true, but on the other hand Modules were standardized more than 6 years ago.
Promises and claims have been made for longer than that on how Modules would have improved compilation times and made everyone's lives easier. In 2026, I still have to see any real evidence of that, especially when PCH + unity builds are much easier to use (except on damn Bazel, which supports neither) and deliver great results.
If after 6+ years of development Modules are still so far behind, it is fair to question if the problem is with the design/implementability of the feature itself.
HarHarVeryFunny 6 hours ago [-]
No doubt reflection has been built with other use cases in mind, but it sure would have been nice just to have std::to_string(enum)
bluGill 6 hours ago [-]
C++ conference speakers (including keynotes) are now begging everyone to stop using enum to string in their example. While they are a simple and easy to understand example, reflection is for much more interesting problems. I can't think of any other example that I would type into a comment box or put on a slide.
theICEBeardk 3 minutes ago [-]
I mean a readable implementation of tuple with minimal overhead is a great case for me (went from around 1.6k lines to approximately 250 lines). I wrote an implementation including the normally difficult to implement tuple_cat based on c++26 within a few hours.
My favorite thing is that I will get to remove and replace most of the cryptic template recursion stuff I have with "template for" and maybe a bit of reflection. Debugging the unrolled stuff will be a joy in comparison.
maccard 5 hours ago [-]
Serialization is the canonical example. Being able to turn
struct MyStruct {
int val = 42;
string name = "my name";
};
into
{
"val": 42, // if JSON had integers, and comments of course
"name": "my name",
}
is incredibly powerfuly. If reflection supported attributes (i can't believe it shipped without, honestly), then you could also mark members as [[ignore]] and skip them.
(The link above shows ImGui generation, but the same exact logic can be applied for serialiation to JSON/YAML/whatever.)
maccard 3 hours ago [-]
Sure, but
> The magic sauce? Boost.PFR! An incredibly clever library that enables reflections on aggregates, even in C++17.
That's not vanilla C++!
SuperV1234 3 hours ago [-]
...so what? It's just a header you have to #include.
maccard 4 minutes ago [-]
By that logic why would anything have to be standardised?
bluGill 4 hours ago [-]
It is powerful, but I'm not sure it is a good idea. Other languages have it, and there is lots of experience in all the ways things go wrong in the real world. I'm inclined to say you should hand write this code because eventually you will discover something weird anyway.
electroly 4 hours ago [-]
Can you give an example of a language ecosystem that went with reflection-based JSON serialization/deserialization and then went on to regret it? I can't think of any, and don't agree with your conclusion. It works great, and manually writing serialization and matching deserialization code is terrible, annoying, error-prone work.
maccard 3 hours ago [-]
I disagree. Rust's defacto default is serde, golang comes with batteries included, dotnet/java have had it for _years_, and all the dynamic languages do it.
SuperV1234 4 hours ago [-]
I think this is a very bad take -- once you write it by hand you have to manually keep it in sync with the actual struct and ensure you made no mistakes. Reflection guarantees 1-1 future-proof mapping with the actual C++ struct, avoids boilerplate, and ensures that the serialization logic is correct.
bluGill 3 hours ago [-]
The protocol is important though, not the internal structure. When you only have exactly one version of a program talking to the same version of itself you don't care. However when you are mixing versions or worse programming language (and thus can't mix structs which are implementation details of your language) the protocol is what matters.
That is if you are worried about doing this by hand reflection is not the answer, something like protobuf where your data structures are generated is the answer.
cogman10 5 hours ago [-]
It comes up pretty frequently in java. Serialization/Deserialization, adding capabilities based on type, Adding new capabilities to a type, general tuning (for example, adding a timing or logging call onto methods).
Almost all the Java web frameworks are giant balls of reflection. Name a function the right way or add the right magic annotation and the framework will autowire it correctly.
It's a pretty powerful tool. (IDK if C++'s reflection is as capable, but this is what was enabled by java's reflection).
SuperV1234 4 hours ago [-]
Java reflection is another beast altogether as it is runtime reflection. C++26 reflection is purely compile-time, which not only means it adds zero runtime cost, but also prevents those kind-of-insane use cases you see in Java and C#.
david422 5 hours ago [-]
> Almost all the Java web frameworks are giant balls of reflection. Name a function the right way or add the right magic annotation and the framework will autowire it correctly.
I find this to be very powerful, and also very unintuitive/undiscoverable at the same time.
cogman10 4 hours ago [-]
Initially, but it very quickly becomes discoverable once you are familiar with how things are working.
Most frameworks in Java are very similar. The ones that aren't are effectively doing what "expressjs" does in terms of setup, which is still pretty discoverable.
Most java frameworks rely on annotations rather than naming schemes which makes everything a lot easier to grok.
kuboble 4 hours ago [-]
Reflection is simply a syntax vinegar for duck typing.
surajrmal 6 hours ago [-]
Anybody the derive traits rust has are a good demo.
randusername 6 hours ago [-]
I can't imagine myself using reflection much, but maybe it will eliminate a lot of feature proposals bogging down the committee and they can focus on harder problems.
It would be cool if the stated goal of C++29 was compile times.
w4rh4wk5 5 hours ago [-]
I'd argue reflection is very much a feature for libraries. You wouldn't use it directly, but your JSON / YAML serialize is then built on top of it. So are your bindings for scripting engines like Lua.
SuperV1234 4 hours ago [-]
You can already automatically serialize/deserialize arbitrarily nested structs since C++17 (using Boost.PFR). Since C++20, you can also serialize/deserialize the struct data member names automatically.
There are a lot of things that are very very important for a tiny niche. In any non-trivial project you will end up with a lot of custom libraries and some of them really benefit from some obscure feature that no place else in your project would want.
agentultra 5 hours ago [-]
Also nice for UI tooling; game tools, debuggers, etc. Pull apart a struct and display it on screen and not have to patch the UI tool every time you change the struct is pretty nice.
Man that aucks was looking forward to some kind of speed improvement. Using magic enum atm and I guess we'll continue to do so.
C++ build times are hard pill to swallow when migrating from c. This is just another reason we'll probably stick to writing c as t the company where I work. It's like asking someone to give up instant compilation for cleaner easier to read apps?
Also now that we have cleanup handlers in c (destructors) even less of a reason to move...
dataflow 4 hours ago [-]
I don't see how a library like Enchantum could handle everything reflection does. (How) does it figure out duplicate enum values, for example? And (how) does it discover arbitrarily large, discontiguous ranges? And (how) does it do these on MSVC?
SuperV1234 4 hours ago [-]
In short, it probes enum values in a pre-defined range (e.g. [-256; 256]), and parses the `__PRETTY_FUNCTION__` macro at compile-time to extract the name of the enumerator.
Once you have that in place, you can easily detect duplicates, etc...
Curious to see if Epic Games ever refactors their reflection in Unreal Engine to use C++ 26 reflections or not.
king_geedorah 6 hours ago [-]
Another win for X macros and for C style in general, though the author didn’t declare it as such.
SuperV1234 5 hours ago [-]
Author here. It isn't a clear "win" at all, there are tradeoffs to each approach.
TZubiri 5 hours ago [-]
"Enum to string"
We've come full circle huh?
Why do you need this, logging? In that case I would rather reflect the logging statement to pribt any variable name, or hell, just write out the string.
If saving for db, maybe store as string, there's more incentive for an enum in the db, if that's a string you might as well. At any rate it doesn't seem a great idea to depend on a variable name, imagine changing a variable name and stuff breaks.
SuperV1234 4 hours ago [-]
Logging, debugging, auto-generation of UIs/editors, etc... This is an extremely common operation and for a good reason.
I program mostly in C, if I need 'meta' programming I just write another C program that processes C source code (I've written a simple C parser), then in my build script I build in two stages, build meta program, run it, build rest of program.
Simple, effective, debuggable (the meta program is just normal C), infinite capabilities - can nest this to arbitritary depths, need meta-meta programming? Make a program that generates a meta program.
For example, what does https://miguelmartin.com/blog/nim2-review#implementing-a-sim... look like with C++26's std::meta::info?
My guess is: libclang is more suited for this situation if you care about compile times, even if Python is used.
When I saw the 'no boilerplate' example, the very first thought that came to my mind:
This is the ugliest, most cryptic and confusing piece of code I've ever seen. Calling this 'no boilerplate' is an insult to the word 'boilerplate'.
Yeah, I can parse it for a minute or two and I mostly get it.
But if given the choice, I'd choose the C-macro implementation (which is 30+ years old) over this, every time. Or the good old switch case where I understand what's going on.
I understand that reflection is a powerful capability for C++, but the template-meta-cryptic-insanity is just too much to invite me back to this version of the language.
Seeing this argumentation is so tiresome, because it feels like there is a lack of self-awareness regarding what is "familiar" and what isn't, which is subconsciously translated to "ugly" and "bad".
In a lot of languages, you achieve the same with 1 line of code. It's not about familiarity, it's about the fact that it's a long and convoluted incantation to get the name of an enum.
Why do I have to be familiar with all those weird symbols just to do a trivial thing ?
Update:
Zig:
const Color = enum { red, green, blue };
const name = @tagName(Color.red); // "red"
Rust:
#[derive(Display)]
enum Color { Red, Green, Blue }
let name = Color::Red.to_string(); // "Red"
Clojure:
(name :red) => "red"
You won't have to care about ^^ and [:X:] if you just want to consume reflection-based utils, which was the whole point of my comment.
And template for but I assume that's like inline for like in zig.
Not familiar with Zig but AFAICT `inline for` is about instructing the compiler to unroll the loop, whereas `template for` means it can be evaluated at compile time and each loop iteration can have a different type for the iteration variable. It's a bit crazy but necessary for reflection to work usefully in the way the language sets it up.
https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#inline-for
But there is also good news that with the advent of JIT like components for compile time evaluation in progress and the like of CLion having the beginnings of a compile debugger in combination with concepts there is a chance some help is available and on the way.
However right now you have to rely on compiler errors and static_asserts which is not ideal of course.
In practice, I haven't really needed to ever debug `consteval` functions -- it's quite easy to get the right behavior down thanks to `static_assert`-based testing and thanks to the fact that they do not depend on external state (simpler).
For one thing they are required to disallow all undefined behavior for compile time execution, and some forms of UB only occur when the code is run.
I never felt the need for them when doing TDD.
Regardless, I don't think things are going to differ much with Clang. Without PCH/modules, standard header inclusion is still the "slow part" of C++ compilation, regardless of the compiler used and the standard library used (libstdc++ vs libc++). `#include` is fundamentally the same on any modern compiler.
Because the reflection feature itself seems quite fast on GCC (compared to the cost of the header), I predict the results will be similar on Clang as well.
Promises and claims have been made for longer than that on how Modules would have improved compilation times and made everyone's lives easier. In 2026, I still have to see any real evidence of that, especially when PCH + unity builds are much easier to use (except on damn Bazel, which supports neither) and deliver great results.
If after 6+ years of development Modules are still so far behind, it is fair to question if the problem is with the design/implementability of the feature itself.
My favorite thing is that I will get to remove and replace most of the cryptic template recursion stuff I have with "template for" and maybe a bit of reflection. Debugging the unrolled stuff will be a joy in comparison.
(The link above shows ImGui generation, but the same exact logic can be applied for serialiation to JSON/YAML/whatever.)
> The magic sauce? Boost.PFR! An incredibly clever library that enables reflections on aggregates, even in C++17.
That's not vanilla C++!
That is if you are worried about doing this by hand reflection is not the answer, something like protobuf where your data structures are generated is the answer.
Almost all the Java web frameworks are giant balls of reflection. Name a function the right way or add the right magic annotation and the framework will autowire it correctly.
It's a pretty powerful tool. (IDK if C++'s reflection is as capable, but this is what was enabled by java's reflection).
I find this to be very powerful, and also very unintuitive/undiscoverable at the same time.
Most frameworks in Java are very similar. The ones that aren't are effectively doing what "expressjs" does in terms of setup, which is still pretty discoverable.
Most java frameworks rely on annotations rather than naming schemes which makes everything a lot easier to grok.
It would be cool if the stated goal of C++29 was compile times.
For many useful use cases, you don't need C++26 reflection at all. E.g. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/vittorioromeo_cpp-gamedev-ref...
C++ build times are hard pill to swallow when migrating from c. This is just another reason we'll probably stick to writing c as t the company where I work. It's like asking someone to give up instant compilation for cleaner easier to read apps?
Also now that we have cleanup handlers in c (destructors) even less of a reason to move...
Once you have that in place, you can easily detect duplicates, etc...
Of course, there are major limitations, as it's all a big hack: https://github.com/ZXShady/enchantum/blob/main/docs/limitati...
Similarly interesting is Boost.PFR, which gives you reflection superpowers since C++14: https://github.com/boostorg/pfr
We've come full circle huh?
Why do you need this, logging? In that case I would rather reflect the logging statement to pribt any variable name, or hell, just write out the string.
If saving for db, maybe store as string, there's more incentive for an enum in the db, if that's a string you might as well. At any rate it doesn't seem a great idea to depend on a variable name, imagine changing a variable name and stuff breaks.