[jira] Commented: (THRIFT-163) Create an Plugin Framework so Developers can plug-in arbitrary code-generation features

["Hannes Baldursson (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-163?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12658628#action_12658628 ] 

Hannes Baldursson commented on THRIFT-163:
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This one looks interesting

> Create an Plugin Framework so Developers can plug-in arbitrary code-generation features
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: THRIFT-163
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-163
>             Project: Thrift
>          Issue Type: New Feature
>            Reporter: Nathan Marz
>         Attachments: 0001-shared-generators-take-1.patch
>
>
> It would be really nice to be able to plug in arbitrary code-generation extensions to the Thrift compiler. There are a lot of application-specific problems that can be elegantly solved by augmenting the Thrift compiler. For example, in my application, I need to be able to find all instances of an object of a certain type reachable from a Thrift object. (Java reflection is too expensive). I doubt that the community would accept this is a feature within the core compiler, but if I could do it via my own extension that would be ideal. 
> There are a number of steps that need to happen to make this work:
> 1. Create an interface that extensions implement - this could be as simple as one method called "generate_body" which is called within the class definition. This allows extensions to create field declarations and new methods. Possibly we might need a "generate_constructor" if the extension needs to do anything in the object's constructor.
> 2. Create a way for the compiler to dynamically load extension modules - I'm not that familiar with how to do this in C++. We might need a configuration file for each module which specifies what language it generates for.
> I think one of the main objections to this will be robustness - how do we ensure that extensions don't conflict with one another or with the Thrift compiler itself? I would propose that we take the Firefox route to addressing this and don't worry about it. It should be up to the extensions designed to choose sufficiently good method and field names to prevent conflicts.
> Thoughts?

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