[AVRO-143] use ASM to accellerate reflection

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Component/s: java
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Doug Cutting
• Created: 13/Oct/09 21:29
• Updated: 15/Oct/09 00:41

Description

Java reflection is very slow, about 100 times slower for field access than normal Java code. However reflection might be a useful tool for converting existing codebases to use Avro.

One could, using ASM (http://asm.ow2.org/) make existing compiled classes to implement the SpecificRecord interface or something similar:

http://hadoop.apache.org/avro/docs/current/api/java/org/apache/avro/specific/SpecificRecord.html

This would make existing classes as fast to serialize as generated classes.