No, no, you really can't. As mentioned elsewhere, consider exception handling, or use of Boost or STL--in many cases, libraries will leak such implementation d

No, no, you really can't. As mentioned elsewhere, consider exception handling, or use of Boost or STL--in many cases, libraries will leak such implementation details during stack traces or interfaces or what have you. From a coding standpoint, using the hottest new sexy library can mean breaking compatibility with older compilers. This might be surprising, but a lot of times shops still use old versions of compilers because they're a known evil. For all these cool new features, consider that C++ has yet to standardize on a standard library file system interface (though one is, kinda, in the works). It only just introduced hash maps into the core standard library. It still does not deign to handle time in a useful fashion: Javascript gets this right out of the box, whereas C++ doesn't even have a way of parsing or generating an ISO-8601 datetime string without having to pull in Boost. ~ The language seems to have abandoned all of the programmers that need to get actual work done, which is fine, because they've all moved to more productive languages like Java, Python, Ruby, Javascript, Go, or PHP.