Reflective version of operator->()

[tim.s...@epicgames.com]

With just reflection, and no reliance on a future generative C++ proposal, we can generate specialized functions that mimic the behavior of constructors and destructors but are customized for special usage cases.  For example: a "deserializing constructor" to generate a new instance of a class from a stream, or helper constructors for optimized garbage-collection schemes.

One thing we can't with reflection alone is member-specific customization smart pointers to classes.  For example, given "gc_smart_pointer<t> p", we can implement "gc_smart_pointer<t>::operator->()", but it has to behave uniformly for all types.

Could we have a per-class overloadable templated variant of operator->(t&) which receives a meta object describing the particular member being accessed?  Then it can customize its behavior according to the type and member being accessed.  This would be useful for optimized garbage-collection schemes (where accessing a POD can be optimized compared to a garbage-collector-managed type); software transactional memory schemes (which would like to store data in a class as a simple type, but access it using a wrapper type), marshaling layers that connect C++ to scripting languages; etc.