There is a silver bullet that would make C++ very competitive for most of the web/db centric apps: It is Reflection/introspection capability built into the lan

There is a silver bullet that would make C++ very competitive for most of the web/db centric apps: It is Reflection/introspection capability built into the language. Without it -- it is impossible to do DB structures to C++ structure mappings, or UI fields to C++ structures mapping. There are of course work arounds (QT's macros, pre-compilers, etc). Every time I approached this topic with some in C++ community, the answer always was ' C++ philosophy is -- if you do not use a feature of a language you will not pay a performance penality for it'. Reflection, obvsiosly adds performance penalty. When I suggest that it should be a compiler switch (like RTTI) -- the reply I get -- is that reflection cannot be turned on/off on per compilation unit., and instead must be on per project level. But C++ standard does not define 'project level' compilation option -- therefore, not acceptable. That's pretty much where this discussion gets stuck