Optics let you concisely describe the location, but defer the dereferencing, so you could definitely approximate optics, not by passing around pointers you compute with `offsetof`, but passing around functions that use `offsetof` to return memory locations to reference (read/write to). You could certainly write a composition operator for `*(*T) => List<*R>`... Some people have done something like it[1][2]:

    Account acc = getAccount();
    QVERIFY(acc.person.address.house == 20);

    auto houseLens = personL() to addressL() to houseL();
    std::function<int(int)> modifier = [](int old) { return old + 6; };
    
    Account newAcc2 = over(houseLens, newAcc1, modifier);

These also use templating to get something that still feels maybe a little less ergonomic than it could be, though.

[1] https://github.com/graninas/cpp_lenses [2] https://github.com/jonsterling/Lens.hpp