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Many game programmers decided long ago that object-orientedism is snake oil, because that kind of abstraction does not cleanly factor a lot of the big problems we have.

There isn't anything close to unanimous agreement, but the dominant view is that something like single inheritance is a useful tool to have in your language. But all the high-end OO philosophy stuff is flat-out held in distaste by the majority of high-end engine programmers. (In many cases because they bought into it and tried it and it made a big mess.)



As a fellow game developer, I have to agree. I find that inheritance is a form of abstraction which sounds nice on paper and may work well within some domains, but in large and diverse code bases (like in games), it makes code harder to reason about and harder to safely modify (e.g. changing a base class can have a lot of subtle effects on subclasses that are hard to detect). The same goes for operator overloading, implicit constructors... Basically almost anything implicit that is done by the compiler for you and isn't immediately obvious from reading the code.


That's suspicion of snake oil paradigm is why it's interesting that game developers seem to be much more open to functional programming. Compare egTim Sweeney's "The next mainstream programming language" (https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced...)




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