I'm a fan of objective-c++ because it gives you some nice tools to cut down on verbosity (e.g. https://github.com/viewfinderco/viewfinder/blob/master/clien...) and c++ is the best language for a core library shared between iOS and Android. However, it does have drawbacks, especially the limited swift interoperability. Build times are also a headache, since many of the features apple has been adding to improve build performance do not work in obj-c++ mode.

They're changing to Swift in the next version.

(He mentions it at the end of the video)

That makes sense, I don't understand how those two constructors are equivalent, it seems that he's missing a couple of parameters in the C++ version.

Properly designed C++ library using templates and macros can lead to surprisingly terse application code - not your standard STL/Boost template syntax mess. I've seen it in one of our gaming frameworks, and in e.g. Google's C++ unit testing framework.

However developing the library code itself requires some serious C++ template fu and the abstraction leaks to the library user in the form of complex error messages.

Strategically used, like in this case, it certainly leads more succint and readable code than pure Objective-C alone.