A C in disguise with better strong typing, compile time programming that beats hands down the preprocessor, while having the preprocessor available if one insists in using it, being able to design abstractions with bounds checking, namespaces instead of 1960's prefixes,....
Template specialization means more generated code, which, again, must fit in 2kb.
On very old archs (16bits, 8bits), there was no OO, because the code could not be complex enough to warrant it. It could not be complex because there wasn't room enough.
That being said, there are templated libraries (like fmt...) which may result in zero overhead in code size, so if the thread OP is using C++, then surely he could also use that library...
> Template specialization means more generated code, which, again, must fit in 2kb.
modern compilers are way better about de-duplicating "different types but same instruction" template specializations so it's less of an issue than you may expect , especially if you're coming with template specialization generation from the mid/late 2000's.
I don't write anything new and use inheritance anyway.
Even in an embedded context you have classes and destructors, operator overloading and templates. You can still make data structures that exist in flat constrained memory.
Even demo scene people use C++ and windows binaries can start at 1KB. Classes, operator overloading and destructors are all still useful. There is no reason there has to be more overhead than C.
What point are you even trying to make now? Every time you've been wrong about something and corrected you don't acknowledge it and just move on to something barely related.