Reflection Use Cases & Pitfalls

The previous chapters in this section built up reflection from the ground floor: what reflect.Type and reflect.Value are, how to walk struct fields, how to parse tags, how to call methods and functions dynamically, and what all of that costs. This chapter is about the decisions you make once you have the mechanics: where reflection genuinely earns its complexity, where it causes problems for code that leans on it too hard, and the patterns that keep production code stable.