[salgernon]

I was refactoring a 700 line recursive C function (!) - one of those with all variables declared at the outer scope while the function itself was mainly a one pass switch with goto’s for error handling. I created c++ classes for each case, hoisted them out and coalesced types that were otherwise identical. The new version was way smaller and and (imho) far more readable and maintainable.

At some point I needed to change the types to capture a byte range from a buffer rather than just referring to the base+offset and length, and it was trivial to make that change and have it “just work”.

These were no vtable classes with inline methods, within a single compilation unit - so they just poof go away in a stripped binary.

‘Tis better to create a class, than never to have class at all. Or curse the darkness.