[matvore]

  > it takes a crazy amount of effort

I agree with basically everything you've said but I don't buy that it takes a crazy amount of effort to do anything. You have C. If it's hard to do in C, you have a Makefile. If it's hard to do with a Makefile, you can run a script during the build process. Anything can be streamlined.

  > it's also possible to have dependency injection in C by using structs with function 
  > pointers, but I think we can all agree that it's a lot less pleasant to use than C++ 
  > abstract base classes

I hate function pointers, and void* context pointers even more, so I wrote macros to do binary search and sorting so I didn't have to pass a void* to qsort(3) and bsearch(3) (also, bsearch(3) doesn't tell you the insertion point of a missing element)

If you want to sort an array:

  int arr[] = {5, 10, 15, 17, 20};
  size_t size = sizeof(arr) / sizeof(*arr);
  QSORT(arr, size, arr[a] < arr[b]);

If you want to find the value 5 in that array:

  ssize_t index;
  BSEARCH_INDEX(index, size, arr[index] - 5);
  // Now 'index' has the result.

[EdSchouten]

With regards that anything can be streamlined: sure, but it’s also about the amount of investment that would take. You could spend days or weeks to automate all of this for C. Meanwhile for Go there exists a tool called ‘mockgen’ (https://github.com/golang/mock) that can automatically stomp out mocks for any interface type declared in code. Not just for the ones in your codebase, literally arbitrary ones: interfaces part of the Go standard library, ones that are declared in third-party dependencies.

The fact that you hate function pointers and void* context pointers is an exact confirmation of my premise: people think it’s too much of a hassle.

[matvore]

  > With regards that anything can be streamlined: sure, but it’s also about the amount of investment 
  > that would take.

Yes, I can't deny there is more up-front cost in C for some things.

  > The fact that you hate function pointers and void* context pointers is an
  > exact confirmation of my premise: people think it’s too much of a hassle.

My point was that there's usually a better way to get around a language's (in this case, C) limitations, and it's not necessarily macros every time. At least for the problem of abstract base classes, I rather liked your hinting of the linker swapping out the desired implementation for test binaries. That makes sense, since I think I've never seen an abstract base class (which is abstract for testing purposes) have more than one implementation per binary.

As for mocks, the fact that they're hard to do in C may be a feature in disguise...