My last job was like this and it was beyond frustrating.
They had essentially re-created the C/C++ language feature of a struct. Rather than letting the compiler/linker worry about where to place the data there was a global array of uint16s. Fields of these ad-hoc structs were placed in this array via defines (sometimes spanning more than one element). Rather than passing pointers to an instance of a struct, they passed an enum which was switched on to find the correct defines to index into the global array and wrangle the data back into a proper type.
So when we were tasked with adding three new instances of a particular ad-hoc struct it cost us tens of thousands of dollars in engineering time. Oh, and all testing was manual as well. The other programmers didn't see the issue and I was just floored by that.
I found a new job, as a sibling comment points out. Sometimes there's no other option.
They had essentially re-created the C/C++ language feature of a struct. Rather than letting the compiler/linker worry about where to place the data there was a global array of uint16s. Fields of these ad-hoc structs were placed in this array via defines (sometimes spanning more than one element). Rather than passing pointers to an instance of a struct, they passed an enum which was switched on to find the correct defines to index into the global array and wrangle the data back into a proper type.
So when we were tasked with adding three new instances of a particular ad-hoc struct it cost us tens of thousands of dollars in engineering time. Oh, and all testing was manual as well. The other programmers didn't see the issue and I was just floored by that.
I found a new job, as a sibling comment points out. Sometimes there's no other option.