Zig Reflection Patterns

Recently, I needed to implement a proprietary binary protocol for a project I was working on. The protocol was used to control an audio graph running on a microcontroller: binary commands are over TCP, affecting change on the processing. While the protocol was very simple and somewhat well documented, there was a very large quantity of commands that needed to be implemented.

As such, in my mind, the quickest way forward was to implement each command as a struct. I could then use compile time reflection to write (de)serializers for the binary protocol.

Simply enough, an initial implementation was made in C++ using boost::hana, which is a lovely metaprogramming library. However, when scaling to 500+ commands the compile times and the compiler RAM usage quickly became infeasible. While it was likely possible to work around this with better use of boost::hana, I went looking for alternatives instead.

I had already been playing with Zig in my time off, and was already familiar with comptime and it’s benefits.