Alternatives

No doubt many will dislike the two-stage invocation pattern i.e.

make<file_handle>{"hello"}();

So let us examine the most obvious alternative: a templated free function make<T>.

Due to the inability to partially specialise templated functions in C++, you need to use tagged overloading e.g.

template<class... Args>
inline outcome::result<file_handle> make(std::in_place_type_t<file_handle>, Args&& ... args)
{
  return file_handle::file(std::forward<Args>(args)...);
}
...
// Now you must always write this:
make(std::in_place_type<file_handle>, "hello");

Tagged overloading is fine for smaller projects, but for larger code bases:

1. It takes longer to type make(std::in_place_type<file_handle>, "hello"), and is possibly less intuitive to write, than it does make<file_handle>{"hello"}().
2. Compiler error messages are enormously clearer if you encode the permitted overloads for construction into the make<file_handle> type rather than letting a variadic free function fail to resolve an appropriate overload.
3. Resolving variadic free function overloads is not constant time for the compiler, whereas resolving the type specialisation for make<file_handle> is constant time. In other words, free functions are expensive on build times, whereas fully specialised types are not.
4. It actually turns out to be quite useful when writing generic code to pass around object constructing factory objects all of which have no parameters for their call operator. It becomes, effectively, a lazy construction mechanism.