Use-cases for reflection

Question

Recently I was talking to a co-worker about C++ and lamented that there was no way to take a string with the name of a class field and extract the field with that name; in o

Answer 1

I can list following usage for reflection:

• Late binding
• Security (introspect code for security reasons)
• Code analysis
• Dynamic typing (duck typing is not possible without reflection)
• Metaprogramming

Some real-world usages of reflection from my personal experience:

• Developed plugin system based on reflection
• Used aspect-oriented programming model
• Performed static code analysis
• Used various Dependency Injection frameworks
• ...

Reflection is good thing :)