You can justify the escape hatches for every feature in C++. The problem is that we eschew sensible defaults to handle the edge cases. Without going into a rust

You can justify the escape hatches for every feature in C++. The problem is that we eschew sensible defaults to handle the edge cases. Without going into a rust war, I think rust's unsafe is a great way to handle this - for 99% of use cases, you _really_ don't want to put an invalid enum value in there. But, in the number of cases where you do, you should have an escape hatch to do so. If you could do: my_enum_type foo(std::vector<char>& buf, int& offset) { // bounds check omitted for brevity // return my_enum_type{buf{offset++]}; // outside an unsafe-style block would cause a compile error, or a throwing constructor. TBD std::unsafe { return my_enum_type{buf[offset++]}; } } you would reduce the possible impact areas to places where you explicitly want to do dangerous stuff. Instead we end up with a feature that is a "zero cost abstraction" which just pushes the bookkeeping onto the user - every switch statemeent needs to handle the case where someone has passed in 42.