Poor Man's Polymorphism

Found out that C structs can be casted between each other if the field types and ordering are the same. It is not portable code, but you can start too see how and why the virtual table and object oriented programming evolved in c++.

As far as I know it would still be possible to write this in c++, but as always, you should definitely not.

A Quick Example

struct Animal {
  int eyes;
}

struct Dog {
  int eyes;
  /* dog specific */
  int tail;
}

struct Human{
  int eyes;
  /* human specific */
  int brain;
}

Passing humans or dogs to any function that takes an animal with a cast.

int look(Animal *this, int object) {
  this->eyes = object;
}

Dog *dog = new_dog();

look((Animal*) dog, obj);