Basic reflection in Dart, with support for introspection and dynamic invocation.
Introspection is that subset of reflection by which a running program can examine its own structure. For example, a function that prints out the names of all the members of an arbitrary object.
Dynamic invocation refers the ability to evaluate code that has not been literally specified at compile time, such as calling a method whose name is provided as an argument (because it is looked up in a database, or provided interactively by the user).
As a rule, the names of Dart declarations are represented using instances of class Symbol. Whenever the doc speaks of an object s of class Symbol denoting a name, it means the string that was used to construct s.
The documentation frequently abuses notation with
Dart pseudo-code such as o.x(a), where
o and a are defined to be objects; what is actually meant in these
cases is o'.x(a') where o' and a' are Dart variables
bound to o and a respectively. Furthermore, o' and a'
are assumed to be fresh variables (meaning that they are
distinct from any other variables in the program).
Sometimes the documentation refers to serializable objects. An object is serializable across isolates if and only if it is an instance of num, bool, String, a list of objects that are serializable across isolates, or a map with keys and values that are all serializable across isolates.
The dart:mirrors library is unstable and its API might change slightly as a result of user feedback. This library is platform dependent and therefore it has implementations for both dart2js and the Dart VM. Both are under development and may not support all operations yet.
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