I believe the primary reason for this separation (which a few people have already suggested or hinted at) is that you can do something in your Init() function that you can't do in your constructor. Namely, you can call virtual functions and expect them to operate correctly! You can't do this in a constructor. To quote Scott Meyers in Effective C++: "You shouldn't call virtual functions during construction or destruction, because the calls won't do what you think, and if they did, you'd still be unhappy". You can read more about this at http://www.artima.com/cppsource/nevercall.html[^]. I have a friend who worked at a company that got so badly burned by bugs related to calling virtual functions from constructors, that they completely banned the use of constructors in all of their C++ code! This seems an extreme solution to me, but you get the point. To my mind constructors should be used to perform "simple" initialization -- initialize data members, allocate some memory, load resource strings, etc. If you need to do very complex initialization that involves calling other functions, then there may be an argument for breaking this out into a separate Init() function. If your initialization involves calling virtual functions, then it must be broken out into an Init() function to ensure it works reliably. Similar arguments would apply to destructors. Rob.