A potential use-case for template mixins?

[Hipreme]

On Monday, 6 February 2023 at 12:22:19 UTC, Matt wrote:
> I am (still) writing a 3D graphics engine, and was considering 
> my choices for a scene graph.
>
> Originally, I was going to use classes derived from my base 
> SceneNode class for the nodes of the graph, but would this 
> instead be a better situation to use template mixins instead of 
> potentially having to include a lot of information in the base 
> class? Or should I go with the traditional "everything is 
> derived from the base class"?
>
> I understand if this is light on details, I'll try and provide 
> more if necessary, but I'm really not far into the design 
> beyond this, and was wondering which would make for an easier 
> path in the future

Use classes. Mixin template are only relevant to types which 
understands the mixin template or when you want to create a 
similar object with similar behavior, but they mustn't be the 
same thing. That means, you need to ducktype everything in order 
to work which could bring a template hell in your code. Unless 
you try to do generics in your code or make it componetized 
rather than inherited, but that could affect your coding style by 
manually passing the node that your object has, this can be quite 
the manual work though.