[jstimpfle]

The C++98 (Win32/MFC) codebase that I ocassionally touch has a lot of ill-designed abstractions in it, and is full of potential memory problems, but at least one can halfway see what's happening, and a full rebuild of the 30 years old codebase can be done in < 10 minutes.

Not sure if it's worse than the impossible to grok and slow to build C++11+ codebases that I've seen - everything is wrapped in unique_ptr and shared_ptrs, add lots of unused overloaded constructors and methods for every const and copy/move/value construct situation, then add an icing of templates. The trend is to assume that problems are solved by wrapping everything in more layers. But it seems like this ends in maybe fewer memory problems but also a lot less useful functionality, makes it a lot slower to build, and makes it so much harder to add, change and fix stuff.

The best code I've seen uses very, very few C++ features (if any at all) and just gets things done in a straightforward way without celebration.