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I don’t understand the comment about not being able to use C++. In C++, you certainly have the same low-level control over your objects as you do in C. You gain a lot of syntax sugar and additional type safety.

If you just don’t wanna use C++, fine. But this looks like a great fit for it to me. Avoid the STL, turn off the features you don’t need, etc.

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The problem is C++ brings in many extra pointers. For example, the vtable pointer used in virtual functions. All the pointers not converted to offset can be invalid in next process that deserializes the object.

You don't have to use virtual functions though. You can just use plain old data structures.

If I use a strict subset of C++, probably will do. However, figuring out the subset of different C++ standards and implementation that doesn't include extra pointers is hard. I might need to re-implement some useful utilities like unique pointer and share pointers as well. Some fundamental data structure in C++ includes pointers as well, like short string optimization introduce extra pointers. With my poor C++ knowledge, I don't even know what are the other pointers are missing..

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