Strictly speaking, you can do it without that stuff, here are some snippets of a test i was doing in Borland C++ Builder 1 (from 1996, that is pre-C++98) a few

Strictly speaking, you can do it without that stuff, here are some snippets of a test i was doing in Borland C++ Builder 1 (from 1996, that is pre-C++98) a few years ago [0] (not using any of BCB's C++ extensions) which end up with this [1] (it is a bunch of controls thrown in a form mainly to test stuff, but the interesting bit is the property editor at the right). If you do not mind relying a bit too hard on the preprocessor you can also do it in plain C [2] (i mean, the C++ approach still relies on it a lot, but the C one goes all the way :-P). A game engine (for a big published game, not my own stuff) i worked on at the past used this approach (the C++ one) heavily and i think it is also quite common in some frameworks. Though personally outside of experimentation i just use Free Pascal which provides the functionality as a core feature of the language (and next version will allow attaching arbitrary attributes to properties, which addresses my "i'd like to have a description for this property for the editor without writing a GetPropertyDescription method" wish :-P). [0] https://pastebin.com/eCYs1tv8 https://pastebin.com/eCYs1tv8 [1] https://i.imgur.com/Ry5114y.png https://i.imgur.com/Ry5114y.png [2] https://pastebin.com/8udWrNcv https://pastebin.com/8udWrNcv