To use, pass --disable-reflection to the configure script.

This produces a smaller runtime library. However, using it for this purpose is not recommended. The main purpose of lite mode is to define a subset of Cap'n Proto which might plausibly compile under MSVC. MSVC still lacks full support for constexpr and expression SFINAE; luckily, most of our use of these things relates to reflection, and not all users need reflection.

Cap'n Proto lite mode inherits its name from Protocol Buffers' lite mode. However, there are some key differences:

- Protobuf generated code included global constructors related to registering descriptors and extensions. For many people, this was the main reason to use lite mode: to get rid of these global constructors and achieve faster startup times. Cap'n Proto, on the other hand, never had global constructors in the first place.

- Schemas are actually still available in lite mode, though only in their raw (Cap'n Proto structure) form. Only the schema API (which wraps the raw schemas in a more convenient interface) and reflection API (which offers a convenient way to use the schemas) are unavailable.

- Lite mode is enabled in an application by defining CAPNP_LITE rather than by specifying an annotation in the schema file. This better-reflects real-world usage patterns, where you typically want to enable lite mode application-wide anyway.

- We do not build the lite mode library by default. You must request it by passing --disable-reflection to the configure script. Before you can do that, you must have a prebuilt Cap'n Proto compiler binary available, since the compiler can't be built without reflection.

- Relatedly, the lite mode library is built with the same name as the full library. This library is not intended to be installed. If anything it should be statically linked. But, mostly the option only exists on non-MSVC platform to give us a way to test that we haven't broken lite mode.