reduce limitations about serialization.dart HOT 1 OPEN

There are no plans at the moment, but pull requests are welcomed :-) This is mostly a proof of concept/suitable for very simple cases. It would be perfectly reasonable to make something based on it that understands more about your conventions. But it would also be nice to improve this one.

The point of the transformer is to avoid using mirrors. If you're willing to use mirrors, the BasicRule does provide quite a bit more ability to specify the constructor to use, the parameters, and so on. But you'd have to do the MirrorsUsed annotations.

Even in the transformer case, using the analyzer it ought to be possible to get enough information to do fairly arbitrary things, the issue is how complicated it is to specify, and which cases to handle. The rules are not that difficult to write by hand, so at some point writing sufficiently general annotations is not that much better than writing the line of code that calls the constructor directly.

If you can use something opinionated/project-specific the annotation approach could be a lot simpler. e.g. you could do

class Foo {
@UseInConstructor
var thing;
var otherThing;
Foo(this.thing);
}

And you're just left with figuring out the order in which to put things in the constructor, or else enforcing that the name in the constructor must agree with the variable name.

Inheritance with constructor parameters is particularly tricky to do in general, because you could have cases like
Foo(this.a, b, c, this.d, e) : super(c, e, namedThing: b);

from serialization.dart.