Jonathan Blow

Like Jon I think that 75% of the cruft and perf mess in C++ is to do with constructors and destructors. I think they get badly abused - RAII shouldn't be quite so literal. I mainly use them to set up error values to spot when I didn't call Init()/Fini() correctly.

Isn’t 75% of all power of C++ in destructors, too?

I mean technically yes because it's the 75% of C++ that is awful and needs to be nuked. Look - all that stuff, other languages do much much better, and C++ can never be that great at it because legacy, but the language designers spend so much time trying to make it work.

If you want constructors to be this awesome powerful one-line-of-code-does-your-whole-ago then you need to go much higher level - get a GC, build a lot more type inference into the language, etc. Don't start with a language originally designed for low-level OS and perf!

What exactly do you mean by this "powerful thing"? C++ ctors/dtors just make it possible to afford not having a gc, they're not that fancy.

Half the features of every new C++ version is to try to deal with the performance implications of everything-is-a-bloody-constructor.

I'm not sure which ones you're referring to... If you mean move constructors / rvalue refs, they aren't for making things faster.