Re: Another XLibre and/or Wayland subthread

On Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:57:44 -0400, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

> I once wrote an audio player using C, simulating "classes" via unions. 
> It was so instructive I never did that again.

When I look at C++ I envision what it's doing under the hood to provide 
the syntactic sugar. Not pretty. I never cared much for full blown every 
trick in the book C++ and if I use it it looks like C With Classes. For 
that matter the early edition of Stroustrup's book that I have looks about 
the same. 

Esri's API was C++/COM and it took some getting used to 'smart pointers'. 
You start of with 'IFeaturePtr pFeature'. That's pretty straight forward. 
A feature has a geometry, so pFeature->get_Shape(&pGeometry) makes sense. 
And then..

ICurvePtr  pCurve = pGeometry;

WTF? pCurve has a bunch of methods that pGeometry doesn't.

Esri finally switched to C# thankfully.