I'm not sure why this was posted. It's aged terribly and I think we can all agree that sidestepping constructors for init functions is basically C++ without the ++. Not sure how that's any different from writing in C.
Not wanting to use feature X of C++ doesn’t make it a shittier C.
But the article is a decade old, the project started 2007. So there is a good chance the project couldn't even use c++11 features. I still recall using initializer lists on my Linux machine only to have the nightly Windows builds fail (we were stuck on an old msvc for a while; the day we upgraded it there was much rejoice).
//Some light editing
has the factory pattern somehow managed to crawl into a hole?
I was just contemplating C vs. C++ today. I've been doing Go for some time and I want to build something relatively small and performant. I think I'll keep some C++ for myself here.