[Const-me]

> Never found that particularly helpful if the code is structured well

IMO, all else being equal, errors detectable at compile-time should be detected at compile-time. Following reasons. (1) No matter the circumstances like time pressure, compiler errors are impossible to ignore, because they fail the build (2) Compiler errors are easier to detect automatically, e.g. many projects have automatic build systems. Even if the project has automatically run unit tests, people still need to write these tests first, i.e. the process is not completely automatic. (3) Runtime checks have runtime costs. Even if the checks are in static initializers or similar, that’s still runtime cost at startup and/or first use. Compile-time checks are free at runtime, makes the code faster.

> although surely with some minimal scripting a symbol browsing tool should be able to be taught about similar patterns

Technically, yes. Practically, two things. If you’re part of a team of developers, in particular if that team is remote, people are using their own computers, and people have varying levels of programming experience, such scripting tools are hard to implement. Another thing, the time spent making and supporting these tools is the time not spent improving the product being built.

[throwawaylinux]

> IMO, all else being equal, errors detectable at compile-time should be detected at compile-time.

I agree and you can do that with C. See compiletime_assert in Linux. An ops table definition or registration macro can do compile time checking that such fields are populated.

> Technically, yes. Practically, two things. If you’re part of a team of developers, in particular if that team is remote, people are using their own computers, and people have varying levels of programming experience, such scripting tools are hard to implement. Another thing, the time spent making and supporting these tools is the time not spent improving the product being built.

In all teams I've been part of including the loosely coupled and highly distributed open source side of kernel development, tools are widely shared and developed together. People don't just get left out in the wilderness. The bigger the project the more true this is.

I get that standard IDE niceness exists for some OOP language features, so it might be some small practical advantage, it just isn't an inherent advantage of the OOP paradigm. We don't need to use C++ to get nice rich and context aware editing search/display.

[Const-me]

> An ops table definition or registration macro can do compile time checking

If programmers writes that check, yes. Same applies to a unit test. C++ compiler gonna verify that thing automatically, no extra work required, neither initially, not over the lifetime of the project.

> tools are widely shared and developed together

I prefer when a freshly cloned repository builds without any extra tools on a freshly installed computer, with either F7 in the correct version of Visual Studio, or something like cmake ../ && make in Linux shell, after installing the required dependencies from the official package repository of that Linux. In my experience, custom tools are often a pain in the long run.

> it just isn't an inherent advantage of the OOP paradigm

The paradigm is orthogonal to programming languages. I think OOP is merely a high-level design pattern where objects keeping their private state only accessible/modifiable by calling methods of these objects.

In this sense, the source code linked above in this thread is 100% OOP, despite plain C. Just like the majority of Linux APIs which operate on opaque handles: open/close/read/write for files, snd_pcm_* functions for ALSA, all these IOCTL requests for V4L2, various handles for Vulkan. All these APIs are implementing an abstraction over external devices with very complicated internal mutable state, OOP is pretty much the only way to go for these things.

[throwawaylinux]

> If programmers writes that check, yes. Same applies to a unit test. C++ compiler gonna verify that thing automatically, no extra work required, neither initially, not over the lifetime of the project.

Yes. Programmers have to write these checks, that's all about what a well structured and maintained codebase is about. They have to write many checks no matter what the language, because missing initializers is one tiny little aspect of things you might want to check for.

> I prefer when a freshly cloned repository builds without any extra tools on a freshly installed computer, with either F7 in the correct version of Visual Studio, or something like cmake ../ && make in Linux shell, after installing the required dependencies from the official package repository of that Linux. In my experience, custom tools are often a pain in the long run.

I didn't suggest otherwise, I was talking about editing and searching scripts and commands.

> The paradigm is orthogonal to programming languages.

Right, C can do it. As I said in the beginning, I don't like the OOP features of C++ because they're clunky inflexible and hardly any benefit in terms of easier syntax.

> I think OOP is merely a high-level design pattern where objects keeping their private state only accessible/modifiable by calling methods of these objects.

No "OOP" is definitely considered to be language features too.