I’ve seen this play out a lot. People say they “write games in C” and then quietly rebuild half of C++ anyway with vtables in structs or giant switch statements, just without the compiler helping. That’s fine if it makes you happier, but it’s not obviously simpler or safer. Also, C++ compile times are mostly a self-inflicted wound via templates and metaprogramming, not some inherent tax you pay for having virtual functions.
A switch statement is how you do ad-hoc polymorphism in C -- i dont thinks an own against C developers to point that out. If they wanted to adopt the C++ style that immediately requires the entire machinery of OOP, which is an incredibly heavy price to avoid a few switch statements in the tiny number of places ad-hoc poly is actually needed
You don't usually do C++ subsets if you want the full shebang.
I have a "mini-std" headerfile that's about 500 LoC implementing lightweight variants of std::vector, std::function, a stack-local std::function (unsafe as hell and useful as hell to avoid allocations), a shared-ptr, qsort and some other nifty stuff.
That does a lot of things, but even then I use other patterns that brings a lot of bang for the buck without having to go full C (hint: the stack-local function equivalent gets a lot of mileage).
