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21 days agoIt’s the capability of a program to “reflect” upon itself, I.E. to inspect and understand its own code.
As an example, In C# you can write a class…
public class MyClass
{
public void MyMethod()
{
...
}
}
…and you can create an instance of it, and use it, like this…
var myClass = new MyClass();
myClass.MyMethod();
Simple enough, nothing we haven’t all seen before.
But you can do the same thing with reflection, as such…
var type = System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly()
.GetType("MyClass");
var constructor = type.GetConstructor(Array.Empty<Type>());
var instance = constructor.Invoke(Array.Empty<Object>());
var method = type.GetMethod("MyMethod");
var delegate = method.CreateDelegate(typeof(Action), instance);
delegate.DynamicInvoke(Array.Empty<object>());
Obnoxious and verbose and tossing basically all type safety out the window, but it does enable some pretty crazy interesting things. Like self-discovery and dynamic loading of plugins, or self-configuration of apps. Also often useful when messing with generics. I could dig up some practical use-cases, if you’re curious.
The hell is that summary, AI-generated? Why yes, people DO work inside the TikToc building.
Talk about burying the lede, by not elaborating on that title, like the article does. “Stripping” does not mean that teenagers are being “stripped” from the platform, or from feeds, like I figured. It literally means that THEY are stripping. OnlyFans style. For gifts. Jesus fuck.