I mean, yeah, you don't make a choice like that without making a lot of other terrible choices too. Like I said "horrendously misunderstood the actor model".

I mean, yeah, you don't make a choice like that without making a lot of other terrible choices too. Like I said "horrendously misunderstood the actor model". And as you seem to be picking up on, they had a very C++98 view at best of how inheritance should work. In case it's not clear to anyone reading along: if you find yourself doing anything like this, take a long, deep look in the mirror; you're almost certainly making the wrong choice. Best I can say is that the architect learned from some of their choices in the years since from the resulting consequences. However, that code is still out there. The engineers have tried to rewrite since then, but it turns out that rewriting isn't adding new features. I don't agree with the company's calculus on the matter, but that's a tale as old as time. And you'd be surprised how many games aren't written well. Writing a game engine is a bit of a rite of passage among young coders, and a surprising subset of those actually ship. In my experience, a lack of maturity in the field and (we'll be courteous and say) 'questionable' threading models (and as you point out inheritance models too) go hand in hand. The point at the end of the day is that Wine users (like Windows users) expect the runtime to do the best it can even against terribly written applications. The users want to run that code, it isn't going to be fixed, so anything Wine can do better to paper over the (incredibly obvious to someone skilled in the art) deficiencies of that code is in their users' benefit.