C++ High Performance

Making a class reflect its members

In contrast to many other programming languages, C++ does not have built in reflection, which means we have to write the reflection functionality ourselves. In this case we simply expose the member variables via a member function called reflect() which simply returns a tuple of references to the member variables by invoking std::tie.

class Town { 
public: 
  Town(size_t houses, size_t settlers, const std::string& name) 
  : houses_{houses}, settlers_{settlers}, name_{name} {} 
  auto reflect() const {return std::tie(houses_, settlers_, name_);} 
private: 
  size_t houses_{}; 
  size_t settlers_{}; 
  std::string name_{}; 
};