this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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Your assumption that "using reflection means the code is wrong" seems a bit extreme, at least in .Net. Every time you interact with types, you use reflection. Xml and Json serialization/deserialization uses reflection, and also Entity Framework. If you use mocking in test you are using reflection.
We have an excel export functionality on our sites that uses reflection because we can write 1 function and export any types we want, thanks to reflection.
A good sense of "code smell" is one of the most valuable programming skills. I think your "probably" is justified: if you're doing X, you should look twice at how you're doing it. Maybe it's right, but usually it's not, so it's worth a pause and a thought.
huh, you’re right! I’m trained on a different kind of code. In C# in particular, which I use mostly to do sneaky stuff (patch/inject runtime code to, um, “fix” it) and when I see a project that it’s too clean it smells
I also see python code (I code regular stuff in it) that could be written much more cleanly using monkey-patching
Modern .NET is reducing dependence on reflection. System.Text.JSON and other core libraries have leveraged source generation to produce AOT + trim friendly, reflection free code. But yeah, it's not a taboo like say
dynamic, it's perfectly normal to use reflection in idiomatic C# code.Hm, I'm currently working on a project with a ton of runtime-configurable plug-ins and dependencies between them. All of that is held together with a copious amount of black QMetaObject magic. I had the same thought about it, but I'm not sure how you'd get similar functionality without reflection and not making it even more convoluted and fragile...
Metaprogramming is extremely useful for long term code readability. What you're doing is probably fine but we can't really evaluate that without seeing the actual code.
That's why I stopped writing code and started writing ASTs and AST transformers that can be configured to emit libraries.