In that case I would have welcomed a simple sentence stating why they won't use 'const'. I very much feel they're not even aware of it. The general feeling I get is that they're trying to work without a compiler, notably without any optimization not warning - some of the code (passing short* instead of int*) will raise warnings -it's likely optimisations passes will often remove some of the copy overhead - the compiler will bark if you write to 'const'

So my general feeling is that they're trying to work assuming people will want to screw their API intentionally; which looks quite unreasonable to me. A bit context about the 'why' would be interesting