I’ve done this with libclang: parsing C++ with clang.cindex in Python, walking the AST for structs with the right annotation, and generating code to serialize/deserialize. All integrated into a build system so the dependency links are there. Obviously being built into the language would be way better, but if I was spending 90% of my time I would take any necessary steps.
Interesting, sounds similar to the dictionary that CERN ROOT generates. Id like to be able to do the same, and a generic "dictionary maker" by what you've described could be useful for allowing multiple formats
to pre-instantiate get<N>(aggregate), for_each(aggregate, f) and other similar functions in https://github.com/celtera/avendish because of how slow it is when done through TMP (doing it that way removed literally dozens of megabytes from my .o and had a positive performance impact even with -O3) ; so I weep a lot when I read that people in the committee object to pack...[indexing]
