C++ has a lot of features which are not best practices. For example, you're not supposed to use the builtin arrays anymore, in favor of vector<>.

Google's guide is not the only one. There are the Scott Meyers series "Effective C++" with things like "declare destructors virtual in polymorphic base classes". D's destructors in polymorphic are always virtual.

This brings up another issue with C++ - conflation of polymorphic structs with non-polymorphic structs. The former should always be passed by reference, the latter maybe or maybe not. What C++ should have done is what D does - structs are for aggregation, classes are for OOP. The fundamental differences are enforced.

How does one enforce not passing a polymorphic object by value in C++? Some googling of the topic results in variations on "don't do that".

> C++ has a lot of features which are not best practices. For example, you're not supposed to use the builtin arrays anymore, in favor of vector<>.

Again, you know better than this. I don't know why you are making these claims, and it's very disappointing to see you make whole sequences of them.

There are no "built-in" arrays in C++. There's C-style arrays, which are there for compatibility with C, and then there's C++'s STL. Since C++'s inception, the recommendation is to use C++'s containers. In STL, there is std::array and std::vector. Which one you pick, it's up to your use case.

This isn't a gotcha. This is C++ 101.