If you are arguing that you don't have immutability by default across all values, that is a very different point that I think you need to provide more clarity for... I mean, of course you can modify state that has nothing to do with the variables that are marked const "regardless of const": that is sufficiently obvious as to be a useless comment. However, you really can mark values as const in C++ and allow the compiler to verify that you aren't doing anything non-epic to defeat it. Yes: you can still accidentally or purposefully access the memory via a random hand-calculated pointer, but we can actually harden the compiler (not the language: no changes there required) against that as well by just keeping you from using pointer arithmetic (really, that's a feature that tends to only be used in restricted contexts anyway).