On Mon, Dec 8, 2025 at 5:55 PM Frederick Virchanza Gotham via
Std-Proposals <std-proposals_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> I reply in series below to Jeremy and Bjorn.
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 8, 2025 at 6:25 PM Jeremy Rifkin wrote:
> >
> > “We introduce” - you and Thomas Healy? If so, all authors should be listed.
>
>
> It's the royal 'we'. For the time being I'm the only author but I'll
> be mentioning a few names under 'acknowledgements'.
>
>
> > Since the motivation relies on extremely heavy use of OOP, maybe
> > discuss how prevalent this is and alternatives to that heavy use of OOP.
>
>
> Isn't OOP to C++ kind of like bouncing a ball to basketball? Honestly
> when I talk about doing OOP in C++, I feel like I'm telling people
> that I use my kettle for boiling water (i.e. obviously I use my kettle
> for boiling water).

For the following discussion, I will use "OOP" to refer to the
specific practice of using base class hierarchies involving virtual
functions and other such runtime type erasure using the same
constructs.

C++ programming once was all about OOPs and class hierarchies. But due
to various problems, people have become aware that this is not a
generally *scalable* solution. As such, people have largely moved to
alternative systems to achieve similar effects.

An entity component system could basically handle the problem your
`chimera_ptr` purports to solve very easily.

Furthermore, I've used unpleasantly nested class hierarchies, and I've
almost never seen the kind of global function that takes a pointer to
something derived from two different base classes and calls a virtual
function from each class. Indeed, most problematic hierarchies I've
used try to follow the Java model and have everything inherit from a
single base class.

Can you find any examples in the wild where this is done and your
chimera_ptr would make it easier?