> Again, why not just stick with C?

The thing that is hard to replicate in C is destructors. Automatic deinitialization when leaving scope in very convenient. It allows you to have multiple exists from the scope without preceding each of them with prologue of dinit_*() calls or creating single exit point and jumping to it.

Coupling allocation with initialization is trivial to do without C++ constructors (which I find to be very poorly designed).