Is it sensible to write a wrapper to use an OO library in this procedural project?

Question

I am writing a program using a procedural style.

At most I have some modules where the logic is present (one to retrieve data from, one to display the info, one with the saving logic, etc.), but my data is in plain object format (they are formally classes, but conceptually they are structs, or named tuples).

All is fine, but I have to use this library, which is heavily object oriented (it offers me custom objects I have to use, and I have to subclass and implement interfaces to get my stuff done).

Would it be a sensible approach to "wrap" this library in a procedural way? Or do I have to change the style of my program completely to "OOP" if I use an OO library in my program?

Answer 1

You can easily write a procedural wrapper around method calls like object.doStuff(parameter) by creating global procedures like:

 void doStuffWith(object, parameter) {
        object.doStuff(parameter);
 }

But when you have an API which forces you to implement interfaces and extend superclasses to make use of it, you won't get around writing some own classes. When you want to write as few object-oriented code as possible, you could have the method implementations of these classes do little more than call a global function to which they pass the method parameters and the relevant state of the object.

 class MyStuffHandler implements StuffHandler {
      public Stuff stuff;
      public void doStuff(parameters) {
          doStuffWith(this.stuff, parameters);
      }
 }

But the question is "Is it worth the effort?". And usually the answer is no. There is not much wrong with mixing procedural and object-oriented code. Most arguments against this usually boil down to arguments against procedural or object-oriented programming in general.