Re: [DotGNU]Starting of the swigging of pnet

[Rhys Weatherley]

On Tuesday 18 March 2003 10:17 pm, Norbert Bollow wrote:

> I'm not even convinced that it is a good idea for DotGNU to contain an
> implementation of Reflection.Emit.  What are the reasons for doing it?

There are applications that can benefit from being able to build and execute 
code on the fly.  Especially scripting engines like JScript.  IKVM.NET and 
mcs also need it, so it is useful for interoperability with other projects.  

There are also some interesting ways that Reflection.Emit could be used to 
generate CORBA/COM/SOAP/XMLRPC marshalling stubs on the fly, for anyone who 
is interested in doing that.  i.e. take some description of the interface and 
generate a class on the fly that can be instantiated as a real C# object to 
communicate with the remote server.

On the subject of mcs: mcs may not be a terribly high priority, since we 
already have our own C# compiler.  However, it would be very useful to be 
able to support MonoBasic (I have no interest in writing a VB.NET clone).

However, I am keeping in mind that Reflection.Emit is not part of the ECMA 
spec.  If it becomes necessary due to patent issues, we can rip it out at a 
moment's notice without losing any core functionality.  We need non-ECMA 
stuff for interoperability, but we also need a "get out of jail fast" button.

Cheers,

Rhys.