What I've learnt is that if you start writing C++ as a plan-old C, you quickly find yourself reaching for this and that feature from C++ that makes your job easier and your code more readable. Knowing where to stop is the tricky part.
The "object-orientedness" of C++ really boils down to implicitly passing the this pointer to member functions, inheritance + virtual functions, and namespaces. All of these can be emulated in what I would call "C with discipline". Just be consistent in your naming conventions, always use a common prefix for globally visible functions and types, and use structs of function pointers whenever you really need virtual functions.
And, before you mention it, use clang to avoid getting the page long templates related errors.
Type-generic data containers can still be implemented with void pointers and very little runtime overhead, for example: http://lxr.nginx.org/source/src/core/ngx_array.h
I am working in DSP project which was started with typical C++ OO BS, finally with ended up with C compiled as C++ + some simple templates for cases as above.
#define MAX(a,b) ({ \
typeof (a) _a = (a); \
typeof (b) _b = (b); \
_a > _b ? _a : _b; \
})
auto max = [](auto a, auto b) {
return (a > b) ? a : b;
};
max (3.1415, 42); // returns double
max (42ul, 78u); // returns unsigned long
max (17, 16); // returns intHow is it template 'nonsense', when those templates do exactly that?
int maxi(int, int);
double: maxd(double, double);
...
#define max(x) _Generic((x), int: maxi, double: maxd, ...default: maxi)