I’ve just read about attributes and RTTI in Delphi 2010. As someone who has used RTTI extensively and looked at reflection in .NET enviously, I can say I’m really looking forward to playing with the new RTTI model.
As for attributes, I’m sure a whole new array of interesting ways of doing certain things is going to be possible. There are currently lots of tools and frameworks which use RTTI to do certain things. Up until now, one of the main drawbacks to this was you could only work on published properties and methods.
One example that comes to mind is a small tool supplied with a third party component that prepares Delphi components and classes for use in a scripting solution. This tool works great, and parses classes to produce the boiler plate code needed for setting up the runtime environment for scripting. Unfortunately, it can only work on published properties and methods. If you want to expose any public properties, you have to do it manually.
These kind of things excite me more than IDE enhancements or ribbon controls. Having said that, I hope the IDE keeps up with these new compiler innovations. Does code completion still work with custom attributes for example?
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