RunSharp: Reflection Emit for Mere Mortals
time to read 2 min | 248 words

I have been dealing with IL generation using Reflection Emit for about two years. I believe that I have enough experience with it to get a feeling for how it goes, and it usually goes slowly and painfully. There are wrappers around it (Castle Dynamic Proxy has a AST for this), but they are fairly specialized, and anyone somehow I always find myself needing to fix the code that build the AST, mostly because I have users that throws weird curve balls at Rhino Mocks.

Nevertheless, IL generation is a powerful technique, just very cumbersome to deal with. RunSharp is a OSS project that aims to solve this issue, it generate code on the fly, using high-level syntax.

This means that you can write code like this:

g.Assign(x, o.Invoke("MyMethod", arg1, arg2));
g.Assign(y, o.Property("MyProperty"));
g.Assign(o.Property("MyProperty"), z);
g.Assign(f, o.Field("myField"));

And it will generate the appropriate:

x = o.MyMethod(arg1, arg2);
y = o.MyProperty;
o.MyProperty = z;
f = o.myField;

I am impressed, if this works, it can mean some very interesting possibilities. I took a very brief glance at the code, and it is using the ILGenerator from the framework, I would be very interested in getting this to work on (a) dynamic methods, (b) cecil.

The license is GPL, however, which means that it is a problem to use in any scenario. In my opinion, such a thing should be LGPL, which would allow its use in other projects, but that is a subject for another day.

Thanks Roy, for finding it.

0 comments
Tags:

Related posts that you may find interesting:

13 Aug 2006 Reflection.Emit vs. CodeDOM
Programming C#
10 Feb 2006 Rhino Mocks 2.6
Rhino Mocks
03 Jun 2005 DynamicCaster is done.
Programming