Raspberry Pi doing i2c LCD display in C++

I'm working on a Raspberry Pi project that needs to be running headless but still be able to communicate with the outside world in some way. We are currently using a simple Red (error), Yellow (waiting for something), Green (Ok) (+blinking) to inform the user of various conditions (you can see them in the picture).

For most features that seem to be ok, but we are thinking about having somekind of display for a bit more details. A cheap 16x1/16x2 display would work quite nicely I think.

Today inspiration hit me to look into that a bit more. I had a 16x1 LCD laying around and a PCF8574T i2c I/O-expander backpack. Wired it up to the Raspberry Pi and started to look for some (proper aka C++) code. No luck there. Just some silly python this and python that. meh.
Well, it works fine on the Arduino.. and that is C++.. hmm, let's port it to plain Linux i2c interface (well, ok, wiringPi i2c wrappers). And so I did.

Here you go:

Raspberry Pi controlling LCD display with i2c in C++

I will do a bit cleanup and then code will be up on github.

You can get LCDs and i2c backpacks from Amazon: