Reflection is a term used to denote the ability for objects in a language to know about themselves at runtime (or "reflect" on their data). Other languages that have this concept built-in may also call this introspection. Either way, knowing about your objects at runtime can have some pretty amazing benefits, including:
- A queryable registry of all of your objects and types
- Objects can iterate over their member variables
- Easy function binding with a scripting language
- Automatically expose objects to an external editing tool
- Automatic serialization and deserialization
These benefits can really save a lot of time and code complexity later on and having it built into your language of choice really makes it easy. However, Qi predominately uses C++ which does not have any concept of reflection at all. Therefore, we have to roll our own!
