This isn't meant to make myself seem smart or to try and make you seem dumb, I'm just curious what was confusing about this even from a high-level perspective. It felt like a clever but not too atypical metaprogramming thing.
Maybe I've just done too much Clojure.
No way anything std::meta gets into serious production; too flexible in some ways, too inflexible in others, too much unpredictability, too high impact on compilation times - just like always with newer additions to the C++ standard. It takes one look at coding standards of real-world projects to see how irrelevant this stuff is.
And like always, the problem std::meta is purported to solve has been solved for years.
> ... just like always with newer additions to the C++ standard.
This is objectively laughable.
Build tools to generate C++ code from some other tool. Interface description languages, for example, or something like (going back decades here) lex and yacc even.
And even if it's true that some things can be done already with specific compilers and implementation-specific hacks, it would be really nice to be able to do those things more straightforwardly.
My experience with C++ changes has been that the recent additions to compile-time metaprogramming operations is that they improve compile times rather than make it worse, because you don't have to do things like std::enable_if<> hacks and recursive templates to do things that a simple generic lambda or constexpr conditional will do, which are more difficult for both you and the compiler.
tombert•2h ago
I'm not 100% convinced that UML is actually useful at all. Obviously if you find value from it, don't let me take that from you, by all means keep doing it, but all it seemed to provide was boxes pointing to other boxes for stuff that really wasn't unclear from looking directly at the code anyway. It's really not that hard to look directly at the class and look directly at the "extends" keyword (or the equivalent for whatever language you're using) and then follow from there. Maybe if you had like ten layers of inheritance it could be valuable, but if you're doing ten layers of inheritance there's a good chance that your code will be incomprehensible regardless.
I'm not against visual diagrams for code, I draw logic out with Draw.io all the time and I've been hacking on the RoboTool [1] toolkit a bit in my free time, but what UML offers always felt more masturbatory than useful.
Maybe I'm wrong, it certainly wouldn't be the first time, but every time I've tried to convince myself to like it I've left a little disappointed. It always kind of felt like stuff the enterprise world does to look like they're working hard and creating value.
[1] https://robostar.cs.york.ac.uk/robotool/
ETA:
[2] By "class", I meant like an education class, not a Java class.*