dima

^TL;DR https://github.com/ddoroshev/c-inheritance

Sometimes you want to abstract and generalize something in C code. For example, if you want to print the contents of a structure multiple times, you end up writing printf("%s %d %f\n", foo->bar, foo->baz, foo->boom) everywhere like a fool, and it intuitively seems that there should be a way to do foo->print(foo), and not just with foo, but with any structure.

Let's take an example: there is a guy with a first name and a last name, and there is a bird that has a name and an owner.

typedef struct Person Person;
struct Person {
    char *first_name;
    char *last_name;
};

typedef struct Bird Bird;
struct Bird {
    char *name;
    Person *owner;
};

To print information about these animals, a cunning C programmer would simply write two functions:

void Person_Print(Person *p) {
    printf("%s %s\n", p->first_name, p->last_name);
}

void Bird_Print(Bird *b) {
    printf("%s of %s %s\n", b->name, b->owner->first_name, b->owner->last_name);
}

And they would be right! But what if we have many such structures and our brains are corrupted by OOP?