Because c++ without OOP still gives you RAII (which is neutered a bit if you don't write your own classes but still), safe pointers, references, lambda, and an immense standard library, to name a few.

C++ RAII is completely gone without the use of classes; it requires something with a destructor.

I guess the OP means pod types (plain Cish structs) where dtors are implicit.

But then what's left of RAII? What resource is there to allocate other than the memory itself? RAII means more than just "get memory to put this in".

Presuming GP includes unique_ptr, there's no real loss of RAII. In my opinion you might as well write trivial classes, but hey, to each his own.

That but without using any of the standard libraries. Even RAII can get in the way.

If by safe pointers you mean unique_ptr etc, I'm pretty sure those are classes: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/memory/unique_ptr

So by definition require OOP?

OOP is such a nebulous thing. Just because the word 'class' is used doesn't mean something is OOP. Those smart pointers don't use inheritance, they don't implement any interfaces, no virtual methods...

I would call that using a subset of OOP features[1], not avoiding it entirely.

But I guess there's no point in arguing over semantics.

[1] As Wikipedia defines OOP: "a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data, in the form of fields (often known as attributes or properties), and code, in the form of procedures (often known as methods)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming

It's not classic OOP without inheritance and virtual functions.

But nobody seriously uses virtual functions anymore, except where they would need to use function pointers, and for precisely those uses virtual functions are way better: cleaner, safer, often faster.

There is still the STL, there are still templates and data structures have a very well-defined lifetime.

Isn't the STL mostly classes? How is that not OO?

STL has nothing to do with OOP . In Alex Stepanov (the ST in STL) words "object orientedness is almost as much of a hoax as Artificial Intelligence"

Well, yes you have some objects in there. But it is rather an implementation detail. You don't use inheritance for instance.

I use string and stream, also most libraries (glew) and compilers (MinGW) that are updated use C++.

To avoid cache misses you can't use OOP, that's probably where this wave of going back to C is coming from:

For example here's how someone that knows how computers work writes Java games: http://www.javaonthebrain.com/java/warp/warp.java

If C gets operator overloading and RAII, there will be no good reason to use C++ for me!!

Only operator overloading is really important and would cut down the size of code written substantially. Thats the only real advantage of using C++ vs C. Everything else oop, function overloading,RAII,etc can be replaced with macros and structs.

Pretty sure you can't make destructors with macros?

Is RAII in C a serious suggestion being made anywhere?

GCC has it as an extension. See the cleanup attribute:

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Common-Variable-Attribute...

It is meaningless without destructors and exceptions.