What (not) to do in a constructor

Question

I want to ask you for your best practices regarding constructors in C++. I am not quite sure what I should do in a constructor and what not.

Should I only use it for

Answer 1

A constructor is used to construct an object - nothing more and nothing less. You need to do whatever it takes to establish the class invariants within a constructor and how complex that is it really depends on the type of the object being initialized.

Separate init() functions are a good idea only if for some reason you can't use exceptions.