Re: Scalap is gone?

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 11:14:12PM +0100, David MacIver wrote:
> It may be essential, but it didn't work properly and hasn't for quite
> some time and no longer has a maintainer. It was discussed on the
> mailing lists a couple times.

Ah, right, thanks, it must have been at a time when my attention was
on other things.

> > Incidentally, in the long run, I think it would be a very good idea to
> > move Scala-specific signature information into annotations, so the
> > type information remained available at run-time, too.
>
> +1
>
> There really needs to be a SIP for a proper reflection API for Scala
> at some point.

Well yeah, that's exactly what I'm working on (once again). Currently,
though, I'm limiting myself to the information that's available at
run-time. Which pretty much amounts just to the JVM erasure. The
recent support for Java generics in signatures gives a little bit more
to work with, but I've not explored that much yet.

It would of course be optimal if all the Scala type information was
encoded in properly structured attribute objects, but as an interim
solution it would be sufficient to just move the current ScalaSig into
a run-time attribute as a plain binary blob. It could then be parsed
by the reflection library.


Lauri