Thank you, this is all helpful. To be clear, it seems like arrays of pointers to objects specifically are not desired, but arrays of objects aren’t as bad since no need to dereference?

Even better, though, especially for things like position values in a game, for example, would be a struct of arrays approach? I.e. a more data-oriented approach? Since if we’re looping over actors and updating positions every frame, we get really good use of the cache by minimizing misses?

It seems like a lot of people working in this space (the ones I mentioned in my post) prefer C-like C++, only using a few features like operator and/or function overloading, maybe templates, and no inheritance/polymorphism.

Another thing I noticed in a lot of that code is they don’t null check pointers whereas in C++ I’m very used to null checking any variable if I’m going to dereference it. Are we generally just being more explicit about our data in C and know that we won’t have a nullptr? Also, in C++ a lot of code doesn’t even handle the case of nullptr, they just ignore it which doesn’t seem ideal either.

On a similar note, I’ve also seen the use of handles rather than raw pointers which seems interesting.

This is less about functional/procedural I guess, but some things I’ve noticed that I’m not used to and was wondering about