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The topic of how to implement polymorphism in C tends to pop up now and then. Many programmers are used to OO design from higher level languages and supposedly OO is a "language-agnostic" way of pr...
#1: Initial revision
by
Lundin
·
2024-10-17T09:34:42Z (about 1 month ago)
How do you implement polymorphism in C?
The topic of how to implement polymorphism in C tends to pop up now and then. Many programmers are used to OO design from higher level languages and supposedly OO is a "language-agnostic" way of proper program design no matter language. So how to do it in C? A design pattern I've often seen is to solve inheritance is on a project/linking level. That is, have some `parent.h` which defines a number of functions but does not actually implement them. Meaning that the user of that library is supposed to implement the functions and then application-level code using `parent.h` will get the inherited behavior by linking the relevant `child.c` to their project. This gives inheritance but not really polymorphism, since you can only have one single behavior per project. It rather seems to be C's equivalent of for example Java's `interface`. So what's a simple way to implement actual polymorphism with multiple object instances and multiple inherited classes in the same project?