[dguest]

It would standardize something they've done in an ad-hoc way for decades. They have a library called "reflex" [1] which adds some reflection, and which was (re)written by cannibalizing a lot of llvm code. They actually use the reflection to serialize a lot of the LHC data.

It's kind of neat that it works. It's also a bit fidgety: the cannibalized code can cause issues (which, e.g. prevented C++11 adoption for a while in some experiments), and now CERN depends on bits of an old C++ compiler to read their data. Some may question the wisdom of making a multi-billion dollar dataset without a spec and dependent on internals of C++ classes (indeed experiments are slowly moving to formats with a clear spec), but for sure having a standard for reflection is better than the home-grown solution they rely on now.

[1]: https://indico.cern.ch/event/408139/contributions/979831/att...

[oyoman]

The library that you refer is not in use for a long time already. The document you pointed out is from 2006 (you can check the creation date).

Since then, a lot has changed, and now it is all based on cling ( https://root.cern/cling/ ), that originates from clang and llvm. cling is responsible generates the serialization / reflection of the classes needed within the ROOT framework.

[dguest]

Good catch: I'm confusing reflex and the cling code that came later. All the issues I mentioned are still there in (or caused by) cling though. Either way standardization in reflection would help.