[swift-evolution] Swift's reflection

[Joe Groff]

I hope that Mirror will ultimately be superseded by key paths:

https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mon-20170313/033998.html <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mon-20170313/033998.html>

Key paths address the mutability limitations of mirror, and give you the ability to work with arbitrary values in a dictionary-like way that Mirror does without an intermediary type. While the initial key path proposal lacks the dynamic discovery of key paths by name/index/etc., that would be a natural future direction to go in. Being able to build or query key paths dynamically would also solve other problems with Mirror, such as not being able to discover the structure of a value without an instance of the value.

-Joe

> On Mar 16, 2017, at 2:38 PM, Slava Pestov via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> Adding write reflection to the existing Mirrors implementation should not be too difficult and we would accept a well-written PR that adds this capability.
> 
> Slava
> 
>> On Mar 15, 2017, at 8:10 AM, Dimitri Racordon via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> Hello fellow evolutionists,
>> 
>> I’d like to ask if someone knows about the current state of affairs of the evolution of the reflection API in Swift.
>> I read it was (or at least used to be) in the scope of Swift 4 to improve on the current capabilities, but failed to see any proposal in that direction since then. I found this evolution post (https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mon-20151214/003401.html <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mon-20151214/003401.html>) from quite a while ago, and would like to know if anything progressed since then.
>> 
>> As a domain specific languages designer, reflection is an essential feature for me. Unfortunately I think Swift is quite behind regarding that point. Most specifically, the inability to set properties discovered from a mirror (without resorting to the black magic of unsafe pointers) has a huge impact on the simplicity of embedded DSLs.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Dimitri Racordon
>> 
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