Yep, agreed, I find this reasonable too. The constructor arguably has a little edge over the method to express that it constructs the object, what do you think?

I haven’t read that book, I may give it a go! Thanks.

It has a name already: Creation Method (refer to the Implementation Patterns book by Kent Beck). Do no use the GoF OOP design pattern name Factory Method for it, imo. Some people call this kind of static class function Static Factory Method, though I think that term should be avoided. This has almost nothing to do with the OOP pattern, despite the fact that an instance of a class is created. The OOP pattern applies DI to the Factory class, to decouple object creation.

I don’t know what is the currently proposed syntax, but an example of implementation for std::advance could be:

template <ForwardIterator Iterator, typename Distance>
void advance(Iterator& it, Distance n)
{
    while (--n >= 0)
        ++it;
}
 
template <RandomAccessIterator Iterator, typename Distance>
void advance(Iterator& it, Distance n)
{
    it += n;
}

We can do something similar with SFINAE (e.g. with std::enable_if), but the syntax gets ugly real quick.

When I can, I use the “static constructor” technique too. I call it “factory method” though, even if it is stretching the definition a little. I use this syntax, which doesn’t repeat MyClass:

auto x = MyClass::makeThatWay();

Then

MyClassM x(MyClass::constructThatWay);

Would become:

MyClassM x(MyClass::constructThatWay());

Thanks.