[swift-evolution] [Pitch] Property reflection

[Anders Ha]

I wonder how the views would work with the value semantic of structs.

The view types proposed, if not being a compiler magic, would need to have a reference to the reflected instance. They are also escapable unless special rules for the view types are enforced. So… perhaps we would want less magic  and special rules?

IMO these views are not necessary, and can be consolidated into typed/untyped get/set calls on `Reflectable`. However, if the intention is to amortize the type metadata lookup, or not to introduce any kind of lookup caching in the runtime, perhaps we can introduce instead property descriptors.

(A quick dump of my idea: https://gist.github.com/andersio/9ff02257b5c89b35fd523dcd09e484e4)

Best Regards
Anders


> On 27 May 2016, at 9:25 AM, Austin Zheng via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi swift-evolution,
> 
> For those who are interested I'd like to present a pre-pre-proposal for reflection upon a type's properties and solicit feedback. 
> 
> First of all, some caveats: this is only a very small piece of what reflection in Swift might look like one day, and it's certainly not the only possible design for such a feature. Reflection comes in many different forms, and "no reflection" is also an option. Deciding what sort of reflection capabilities Swift should support is a prerequisite to stabilizing the runtime API, which I imagine has resilience consequences. I'm not really interested in defending this specific proposal per se, as I am looking for a jumping-off point to explore designs in this space.
> 
> Anyways, here is a gist outlining the public API to the feature: 
> 
> https://gist.github.com/austinzheng/699d47f50899b88645f56964c0b7109a <https://gist.github.com/austinzheng/699d47f50899b88645f56964c0b7109a>
> 
> A couple of notes regarding the proposal:
> 
> The API names need improvement. Suggestions welcome.
> 
> It's opt-in: types have to conform to a special protocol for the compiler to generate whatever hooks, metadata, and support code is necessary. Once a type conforms, the interface to the reflection features naturally present themselves as protocol methods. It would be great to allow an extension to retroactively enable reflection on a type vended by another module, although I have no idea how feasible that is.
> 
> It uses "views": there are four types of views, two of each in the following categories: typed vs untyped, get-only versus get-set. A view is a struct representing a property on an instance of a type (or maybe a metatype, for type properties). It allows you to get information about that property (like its name) and try getting and setting its values.
> 
> (You can get a get-only view to a property, and then try and upgrade it later to a get-set view, if the underlying property is get-set. If you don't care about setting, though, you can just work exclusively with get-only views.)
> 
> It supports both typed and untyped access. You can ask for a property view specifically for (e.g.) a `String` property, and if you get one you can be assured that your getting and setting operations will be type safe. You can also ask for an "untyped" property view that exposes the value as an Any, and allows you to try (and possibly fail, with a thrown error) to set the value.
> 
> The requirements part of it is composable. For example, you can imagine a future "FullyReflectable" protocol that simply inherits from "PropertyReflectable", "MethodReflectable", and other reflectable protocols. Or maybe a library requires reflection access to types that it needs to work with, and it can create its own protocols that inherit from "PropertyReflectable" and naturally enforce reflection support on the necessary types.
> 
> It looks a bit cumbersome, but there's room for refinement. Users won't necessarily see all the types, though, and the interface is pretty straightforward:
> 
> ```
> myPerson.typedReadWriteProperty<Int>("age")?.set(30)
> 
> try myPerson.allNamedProperties["age"]?.set(30)
> ```
> 
> I'm not yet sure how it should interact with access control (my inclination is that it would only expose the properties you'd be able to directly access), or property behaviors (I think get-set behavior is fundamental to properties, although "behavior metadata" on the views might be useful).
> 
> I'd also have to figure out how it would operate with generic types or existentials.
> 
> Anyways, thanks for reading all the way to the end, and any feedback, criticism, or alternative proposals would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Best,
> Austin
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