introspection in ES4

# zwetan (19 years ago)

Hello,

seeing the discussion about JSON it made me think about code introspection and wondering what kind of "language element" developpers will have to do that in ES4 ? and how far serialization/deserialization mecanism will be able to go ?

taking AS3 as exemple, you can do only introspection using flash.utils.describeType function

my problem with that are:

  • it's vendor specific, should it not be better to have such mecanism defined in the ES4 language ?
  • in AS3 you can only access public members which is good for security but bad for serialization/deserialization

I understand where JSON is heading, but is it the only language element that is planed ? can we really not have something as toSource() and its counterpart fromSource() ? Do I overlook what would be possible to do if developpers can access the internal namespace ?

What if people want to do more than JSON and serialize/deseiralize "new Date()" or other custom class ? what would be the options ?

zwetan