I think you're right, but for me Java lacks compile-time features sorely (JavaPoet looks alright, but suffers from not being an official component of the JDK).

I think you're right, but for me Java lacks compile-time features sorely (JavaPoet looks alright, but suffers from not being an official component of the JDK). Thinking about the user I'd much rather have that processing done at compile-time than startup-time. I guess this is part of where the appeal of Scala and Clojure lies. Rust and Nim provide the sort of thing I mean, hygienic macros - they're nicer than reflection because you keep type safety and you keep run-time performance without generating a bunch of transient source files. Nim's also got a nice RTTI interface, too.