[jjoonathan]

Then why do the solutions people use to work around the absence of reflection always seem to suck so much? They're (in some combination) verbose, highly un-DRY, require spectacular feats of type-system-fu, and at the end of the day they deliver capabilities that come up laughably short of their competition in other languages. I'm still waiting for a member of the "Reflection is Useless" crowd to show me a serialization framework on par with what I find in Java (100% DRY, 100% automatic for POD, 100% override-able without a type repository, 100% devoid of compiler/linker trickery). Or a desktop framework that offers UI design capabilities comparable to the introspection-based ones I find in ObjC, C#, or whatever you want to call the home-brew C++-with-reflection that Qt uses.

[devit]

The best apprach is to have "reflection" (really, access to the compiler AST or IR) at compile time and generate code from this, since that minimizes the run-time overhead.

See Rust's serde for an example of that for serialization.

[to3m]

Yes. And don't just think about how messy the homegrown alternatives are - note how much effort people go to add them in! It's just such a useful thing to have - serialization; logging; UI generation; automatic scripting language bindings - and that's why people bother.