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> which is one of the few compatibility breaks that C++ did with C

It's not "few" though, it's "quite a lot". C and C++ semantics are so different that you'll have to write in a specific "common C/C++ subset" for code that should compile both in C and C++ mode.

For all the flak that Objective-C usually gets by both C and C++ people it did one thing right: it respects C as a proper subset instead of creating its own bastard-fork like C++ did and then freezing it in the mid-90s.

I know, that's why I wrote that the code looked like it was written by someone who wanted to write in C (as opposed to someone who wanted to write in C++, a different language).

Does anyone know, why does C++ forbid implicit casts from void*?

C++ tries to have a slightly stricter type system than C. The compiler can't check anything when you cast from void*, and since C++ has other mechanisms which usually make casts from void* unnecessary (such as using 'new' instead of 'malloc' for heap allocation), I think it makes sense to require casts from void* to be explicit.