Readme

Smoke (and mirrors)

Smoke is a package that exposes a reduced reflective system API. This API includes accessing objects in a dynamic fashion (read properties, write properties, and call methods), inspecting types (for example, whether a method exists), and symbol/string convertion.

The package provides a default implementation of this API that uses the system's mirrors, but additionally provides mechanisms for statically generating code that can replace the mirror-based implementation.

The intention of this package is to allow frameworks to use mirrors in a way that will not impose on their users. The idea is that users will not worry about how to preserve symbols when compiling with dart2js (for instance, using the MirrorsUsed annotation). Instead, this package provides the building blocks to autogenerate whatever is needed for dart2js to be happy and to generate reasonable code.

Note this package alone doesn't know how to generate everything, but it provides a simple API that different frameworks can use to define what needs to be generated.

Smoke reflective API

Use package:smoke/smoke.dart in your framework to read and write objects and to inspect type information. Read the Dart-docs for more details.

Code Generation

Use package:smoke/codegen/generator.dart and package:smoke/codegen/recorder.dart in your transformer to create a static initialization that can be used by smoke. The test under test/codegen/end_to_end_test.dart is a good illustrating example to learn how to use these APIs.