Today’s post by Edoardo Vacchi stresses an important trend in the programming landscape: cloud-based applications (microservices) should be small, super-efficient, and quick to start, that brings us back to code generation. “Moving processing out of your run-time and into build-time, is a conceptually simple but extremely effective way to make your applications lighter.” Link

“This was sometimes received with little enthusiasm: the idea itself is in fact far from new. Yet, it is key to a lot of the most interesting recent innovations in the Java ecosystem.

For better or worst, run-time reflection is a peculiarity of the Java ecosystem. However, today a lot of modern Java frameworks are embracing code generation; which is ironic, because, as far as I know, run-time reflection was often embraced as a reaction to slow code generation procedures.

In Kogito, we are using code generation to pre-process and compile so-called “business assets” into executable code. In the following we will explore the history and the motivations for embracing code generation instead of run-time reflection, and how we plan to bring our approach to codegen forward, by taking hints from compiler design.”