It's not necessarily a bad idea as long as you apply modern C++ practices. If you're going to be poking around with raw pointers, you might want to use a safer

It's not necessarily a bad idea as long as you apply modern C++ practices. If you're going to be poking around with raw pointers, you might want to use a safer language, but if you want to use things like std::shared_ptr, C++ can be quite safe while continuing to provide good performance.