Why? Isn't one of the ideas of C++ that every constructed object is in a valid state? Even the STL has constructors that can fail, and it does it through member

Why? Isn't one of the ideas of C++ that every constructed object is in a valid state? Even the STL has constructors that can fail, and it does it through member variables/flags, which doesn't seem like a very good solution: std::fstream s(filename); if (!s.is_open()) { std::cout << "failed to open " << filename << '\n'; } No one should ever have to use factories, they really suck. Too much boilerplate, too much code duplication.