C++ More C++26 reflection at compile-time -- Andreas Fertig

By Blog Staff | Jul 15, 2026 01:20 PM | Tags: None

In today's post, I like touch-up on C++26's static reflection. In case you haven't seen, I wrote a first post C++26 reflection at compile-time a while ago.

C++ More C++26 reflection at compile-time

by Andreas Fertig

From the article:

One of the great things about reflection is that we can already explore the new feature since with Clang there is a compiler available that implements all the facets.

I was again exploring what of my use cases would be better solved with reflection. Now, one thing that I had to do most of my career is reading and writing data coming from a network connection. The definition of network was different at different times. What was common is, that everything going out was sent in network byte order (big-endian), and the everything that was received arrived in network byte order as well. For some systems there was no difference, as they where already big endian machines. But not all the time. Especially ARM pushed little endian. For a subset of the systems data had to be byte-swapped when it was received or sent.

How to swap data?

The issue here (was) is, how to swap the data? Every data type larger than a byte must be swapped every time. C++23 gave us std::byteswap which removes the need for the POSIX functions like htons. At least an improvement in terms of safety.