TypeKitchen is a small library for fast meta-programming in .NET.
TypeKitchen was built on the premise that there are only so many actions that are useful to take with types at runtime. However, rather than standardize on a single library that performs all of these actions well, there are myriad libraries available on NuGet, each taking a different approach with varying levels of performance, in terms of quality, speed, and memory use.
TypeKitchen replaces these libraries with a concise API to perform the following meta-programming tasks:
- Field and Property Access: getting and setting data members by name, including private members and anonymous types
- Method Call Invocation: calling methods on runtime types, when you know the arguments at runtime, and even when you don't
- Object Activation: creating new instances of types, typically because
Activator.CreateInstanceis too slow - Object Pooling: when you want to avoid over-allocating memory that will be garbage collected later
- Type Resolution: when you want to describe how object instances should be created, and manage their lifetime, in a deferred fashion (i.e. inversion of control / dependency injection)
- Wire Serialization: when you want a fast and non-allocating wire format for serializing/deserializing runtime types
- Templating: when you want to create string templates based on data in C# objects, and may want to limit what code can be executed in those templates to a strict DSL or set of types
- Snippets: when you want to write adhoc C# code, and have it compile and execute at runtime without requiring application downtime or reflection overhead
- Weaving: when you want to inject custom code before or after methods, even if they live outside your own code
- Duck Casting: when you have a type or method, and you want to call it as if it were an implementation of a interface, when it isn't
- Composition: when you want to build up a type at runtime to implement various members declared in other types, or provided inline
- Flyweight Factory: when you want to represent one or more views of a piece of data, but do not want to materialize those views
- MSIL Helpers: when you want to see the IL of a compiled Expression or DynamicMethod, or want to code-generate calls to
ILGeneratorthat would produce a given method body - Coverage: when you need to walk compiled bytecode to determine paths through other code, such as when building code coverage or visualization tools
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