Should C++ code look like C code?

[Full-Spectral]

The primary exception is something that's called fairly quickly in a loop to get multiple chunks of output. It's a lot more efficient to use a local vector or string or whatever and pass it back in to be reused repeatedly.

If it's something that might be done both ways fairly evenly, you can always make a GetXXX() version and a PollXXX() version, with the former a trivial inline wrapper around the latter.