Their style guide http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.xml#Exceptions http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.x... is s

Their style guide http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.xml#Exceptions http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.x... is sheepish about it. The authors seem to believe using exceptions would have been better, except they found themselves beyond a critical mass of bad code that would fail or leak on a throw, and now they can't fix it all or throw it away. I can't understand how a correct init method could be easier to write than a ctor, given that the compiler is required to generate code that knows which of your base classes and fields are already initialized at any point they could fail, which you would have to do yourself after moving to an init method, as well as losing the guarantee you can't silently ignore an error by forgetting to check for it.