How does a proper C++ constructor report errors?
First I can think of: don't create situations where error can happen. Compile with exceptions turned off. Out of memory? Terminate the process/thread.
Another: create your objects using some factory, make constructor empty and initialize class by said factory once instance is already created (perhaps recursively instantiating its members). This way all error generating code will be moved outside of constructor.
See how Google approach it: https://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide....
I thought it was routine. Until C++11 made smart pointers standard, it was unreasonably difficult to write exception-safe code, so my understanding was that a lot of C++03 code didn’t even try. Game developers would routinely use -fno-exceptions and -fno-rtti for reliability and performance reasons.