Dear Andrzej Krzemienski, Wrapping all of the used APIs -- and maintaining those wrappers for any long-term, sustained period of time -- is not a feasible task or architectural burden for many developers and their codebases. Transforming error returns + initialization sequences is a subject best left to an entirely separate library, possibly using the Reflection TS and (maybe) some form of Herb Sutter's proposed metaclasses idea. Doing that in a generic way in today's C++ without these facilities is incredibly difficult and likely to produce unwieldy boilerplate or a large number of specially hand-crafted functions. Finally, out_ptr works with far more than just pointers. The specification and implementation has out-of-the-box support for plenty of RAII types, including retain_ptr/intrusive_ptr, unique_resource, my own handle type (as shown in the example code), and more. In the San Diego C++ meeting LEWG was very pointed in asking whether this works for just pointers or a large class of types: the design very deliberately works with most pointer types. (Comparisons to nullptr are part of that deal, but nothing requires nullptr initialization: the specification specifically uses "it's value initalization" when it needs to create an empty Pointer object.) Sincerely, JeanHeyd