I looked at these things for quite a while but they tend to be very heavy-handed. They might prevent you from using inheritance, or having strange constructors etc etc. In the end they ended up being too much of a burden instead of a convenience.
This approach for exposing members that I now use is quite lightweight and lets you explore a class for serialization or setting all fields called "x" to 0, for example. It's also statically determined so is very very fast. No layers of library code or code-gen to worry about messing with the build process. It generalises to hierarchies of nested types.
Set your editor up with some macros to automate writing some of these things.
struct point
{
int x;
int y;
// add this to your classes
template <typename Visitor>
void visit(Visitor v)
{
v->visit(x, "x");
v->visit(y, "y");
}
};
/** Outputs any type to standard output in key=value format */
struct stdout_visitor
{
template <typename T>
void visit(const T& rhs)
{
rhs.visit(this);
}
template <typename Scalar>
void visit (const Scalar& s, const char* name)
{
std::cout << name << " = " << s << " ";
}
}
