Smoke is a package that exposes a reduced reflective system API. This API includes accessing objects in a dynamic fashion (read properties, write properties, and call methods), inspecting types (for example, whether a method exists), and symbol/string convertion.
The package provides a default implementation of this API that uses the system's mirrors, but additionally provides mechanisms for statically generating code that can replace the mirror-based implementation.
The intention of this package is to allow frameworks to use mirrors in a way that will not impose on their users. The idea is that users will not worry about how to preserve symbols when compiling with dart2js (for instance, using the MirrorsUsed annotation). Instead, this package provides the building blocks to autogenerate whatever is needed for dart2js to be happy and to generate reasonable code.
Note this package alone doesn't know how to generate everything, but it provides a simple API that different frameworks can use to define what needs to be generated.
Use package:smoke/smoke.dart
in your framework to read and write objects and
to inspect type information. Read the Dart-docs for more details.
Use package:smoke/codegen/generator.dart
and
package:smoke/codegen/recorder.dart
in your transformer to create a static
initialization that can be used by smoke. The test under
test/codegen/end_to_end_test.dart
is a good illustrating example to learn how
to use these APIs.