Not at all, there are several other ways: - Error flag in the class (not a good solution, though, as others have noted) - Factory function that returns a smar

Not at all, there are several other ways: - Error flag in the class (not a good solution, though, as others have noted) - Factory function that returns a smart pointer, or null on error. - Just ensure your constructor never fails. (This probably means aborting on allocation failure. In practice that’s usually fine, depending on application.)