Explanation for - No Reflection involved

Question

I have a very simple question. This is not only true with spray-json but I have read similar claims with argonaut and circe. So please enlighten me.

In spray-json, I have come across the statement saying There is no reflection involved. I understand for type class based approach, if the user provides JsonFormat then all is well. But is this claim also true when it comes to using DefaultJsonProtocol?

Because when we you look at this, you can see the usage of clazz.getMethods, clazz.getDeclaredFields, etc. Isn't this the usage of reflection? Though of course thanks to object#apply that we do not need to worry about setting unlike in Java world using reflection. But at least for reading the field names, I do not understand on how reflection can be overlooked.

Answer 1

I'm not very familiar with spray-json, so I won't defend its claims about reflection, which definitely seem to be at odds with the parts of ProductFormats you point to.

I do know more about circe and Argonaut and argonaut-shapeless and Play JSON, all of which do use a kind of reflection to derive codecs for case classes and other user-defined types. The important point is that these libraries don't use runtime reflection—they determine the field names and other information they need at compile time through Scala's macro system.

Generally when people talk about "reflection" in the context of Java or Scala, they mean runtime reflection, but macros also support a kind of reflection, so when I personally talk about how derivation works in these libraries, I try to be careful to specify that there's no runtime reflection involved.

You can argue that compile-time reflection (or metaprogramming, or whatever you want to call it) is much less bad than runtime reflection. It may make your code more complex, and it's very easy to abuse, but it doesn't introduce the same kinds of fragility as runtime reflection, and it doesn't undermine your ability to reason about your code in the same ways that runtime reflection does. If you understand what the macro does (which is a big if), you'll never be surprised at runtime.

Types are fundamentally about rejecting bad potential programs before you run them, and introspection on types at runtime muddles this all up (as Erik Osheim says, "If you meet a Type in the Runtime, kill it"). On the other hand, introspection on types at compile-time is exactly what compilers do, and macros just give you as the programmer a clean way of getting involved in that process (or at least relatively clean, compared to writing compiler plugins, etc.).

There may also be performance benefits to avoiding runtime reflection, but for me personally that's generally a secondary concern—I hate runtime reflection because I've wasted too much of my life debugging horrible Java code that uses horrible Java libraries that depend heavily on runtime reflection—not because runtime reflection might make my programs marginally slower.

That's all a very long-winded way to say that you should read "there is no reflection involved" in this context as "there is no runtime reflection involved" (and even then you shouldn't take the author at their word, I guess, given all that getMethods stuff in spray-json).