TypeKitchen

TypeKitchen is a small library for fast meta-programming in .NET.

TypeKitchen was built on the premise that there are only so many actions that are useful to take with types at runtime. However, rather than standardize on a single library that performs all of these actions well, there are myriad libraries available on NuGet, each taking a different approach with varying levels of performance, in terms of quality, speed, and memory use.

TypeKitchen replaces these libraries with a concise API to perform the following meta-programming tasks:

Common Tasks

• Field and Property Access: getting and setting data members by name, including private members and anonymous types
• Method Call Invocation: calling methods on runtime types, when you know the arguments at runtime, and even when you don't
• Object Activation: creating new instances of types, typically because Activator.CreateInstance is too slow
• Object Pooling: when you want to avoid over-allocating memory that will be garbage collected later
• Type Resolution: when you want to describe how object instances should be created, and manage their lifetime, in a deferred fashion (i.e. inversion of control / dependency injection)
• Wire Serialization: when you want a fast and non-allocating wire format for serializing/deserializing runtime types

Less Common Tasks

• Templating: when you want to create string templates based on data in C# objects, and may want to limit what code can be executed in those templates to a strict DSL or set of types
• Snippets: when you want to write adhoc C# code, and have it compile and execute at runtime without requiring application downtime or reflection overhead
• Weaving: when you want to inject custom code before or after methods, even if they live outside your own code
• Duck Casting: when you have a type or method, and you want to call it as if it were an implementation of a interface, when it isn't

Rare / Advanced Tasks

• Composition: when you want to build up a type at runtime to implement various members declared in other types, or provided inline
• Flyweight Factory: when you want to represent one or more views of a piece of data, but do not want to materialize those views
• MSIL Helpers: when you want to see the IL of a compiled Expression or DynamicMethod, or want to code-generate calls to ILGenerator that would produce a given method body
• Coverage: when you need to walk compiled bytecode to determine paths through other code, such as when building code coverage or visualization tools

Logo

Logo is from Font Awesome, and is under a CC BY 4.0 License.