It buys you the speed of C (or close), with nice abstractions. And when you use destructors correctly, it can provide pretty much automatic memory management to

It buys you the speed of C (or close), with nice abstractions. And when you use destructors correctly, it can provide pretty much automatic memory management too, much safer than C. And it's pretty simple to avoid all these warts, just... you know don't write them. On the other hand I don't have any experience with old C++ codebases, which is where you're likely to find this hellish stuff.