meta_utils Directory Reference

Files
	meta_utils.cpp
	meta_utils.hpp

Detailed Description

This is a system which creates a "meta program", a meta program is a reflection system, it allows you to ask questions and do stuff with your existing code. Here are some things it currently does:

• Allows you to take in a string invocation, and actually run the correct function (direct call)
• Allows you to take in a string invocation, and return a function that will do that invocation later on (deferred call)
• Automatically generates to_string, from_string, serialize, deserialize for custom types that you register

TODO

• Add string invocation for object methods, the function takes in the target object and a string and calls the correct method
• Add support for recursive custom types, eg a class that contains a vector of itself.

Gotchas

• Some types are not able to be reconstructed, one example of this the std::regex object, the problem with it is that you construct it by passing a pattern, and so you would expect from_string to take in the pattern and construct the regex, which makes sense and is possible, but the to_string can't be defined in a way that allows to say that r = from_string(to_string(r)) as we don't have access to the pattern, thus we cannot define these functions for this type, keep this in mind.
• This system looks at the source code, and creates code based on it, therefore if you make changes to your code the meta program will not update until you re-run the program, that will generate new meta program code, which needs to be compiled to be used.
• One more time, for the meta program to be updated, we follow this paradigm: modify code -> run program -> compile
• You may not want to add the meta program to your git repository as it adds a lot of generated code (if you want to run metrics on code you write, that might matter)

Put this in your cmakelists if you need conditional logic on if the meta program has been generated or not

set(GENERATED_META_PROGRAM_HEADER "${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}/src/meta_program/meta_program.hpp")
 
if(EXISTS "${GENERATED_META_PROGRAM_HEADER}" AND NOT IS_DIRECTORY "${GENERATED_META_PROGRAM_HEADER}")
    message(STATUS "Found generated meta_program.hpp, enabling GENERATED_META_PROGRAM")
    target_compile_definitions(${PROJECT_NAME} PRIVATE GENERATED_META_PROGRAM)
endif()