On one hand it's good things like this are written, on the other hand it's a bit of a shame it still gets written. We should have moved beyond that by now, but adoption of modern C++ goes so slow.. Not exactly sure what the reasons are - sometimes it just seems like stubborness to me - I hear 'legacy' often, and yes if your codebase doesn't even compile with the latest compilers than it's a valid argument, but otherwise: it's not exactly hard to interface modern C++ with C-with-classes. Anyway I've worked in multiple teams and after the initial stage of getting overit and doing the right thing none of useever writes code like the 'bad' examples anymore since smart pointers and collections were made commonly available years ago and they solve most of the problems in this pdf.