Inside Starcraft

CUnit < CDoodad < CFlingy < CThingy
Turnkey level ENTERPRISE C++ class hierarchy!

http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-starcraft

It surprised me that they messed up working with doubly-linked lists.  According to the author, every time they had to manipulate the list they did the pointer acrobatics by hand.  This is definitely a WTF moment because function call overhead in 386 family back then was not so severe, and compilers already knew how to inline shorter functions, but even if all of the list mutation occurred inside tight loops and they did not trust their compilers to inline functions where it was really needed, they could just #define some CPP macros (like they do in Linux kernel all the time).  OK, class hierarchy and other architecture issues can be hard even for seasoned programmers, but trusting people who can mess up things as simple as working with well-known data structures is like trusting maintenance of your house to a person who cannot tell a wrench from a hammer.