This is no worse than anything else in the standard library. Writing generic template code is always ugly but once written you don't have to deal with the uglin

This is no worse than anything else in the standard library. Writing generic template code is always ugly but once written you don't have to deal with the ugliness to use the resulting functions. It's not worth the complexity in most cases but if it's something general you're going to use a lot (and lots of C libraries have this idiom of Resource_Init Resource_Destroy function pairs) then it can be worthwhile. Eigen is a quintessential example. It's some of the most complex and inscrutable template code out there but it makes writing numerical code in C++ almost as nice as matlab while also being extremely fast.