C++ gives lots of optional features, so it requires a bit of discipline to use effectively and avoid running into the state explosion that the author ran into f

C++ gives lots of optional features, so it requires a bit of discipline to use effectively and avoid running into the state explosion that the author ran into for both their gripes. But ironically one the reasons the author chose C++ is that enforced a consistent coding style (As a C++ programmer: I don't believe you). There's just as many pitfalls in C as well like unstructured programming via goto, signal handlers, not being disciplined about structs when doing OOP, etc. --- Take the second issue about partially initialized objects being hard to avoid without using exceptions in C++. You can actually do something similar to the C approach the author prefers! Just make the iffy constructor private, then wrap it in a builder function which can either return the object or an error. However that requires the intuition that requiring the user to call a follow up init() or is_valid() function is a bad idea, which requires a lot of C++ experience.