Coding style for C++ constructs going forward

[Joel Brobecker]

Hi Luis,

> cc-ing the GCC mailing list, as we may want to use the same coding style for
> GDB and GCC.
> 
> Yesterday I brought this topic up on IRC. I notice we started using more and
> more the "auto" keyword. In some cases, this is actually useful and makes
> the code a bit more compact. GDB has been using those more often, whereas
> GCC, for example, isn't using those too much.
> 
> Looking at the coding standards for GCC
> (https://gcc.gnu.org/codingconventions.html), I don't see anything dictating
> best practices for "auto" use.
> 
> I guess it is a consensus that "auto" is a good fit when dealing with
> iterators, lambda's and gnarly templates (but only when the type is already
> obvious from its use).
> 
> There are other situations where "auto" may make things a little more
> cryptic when one wants to figure out the types of the variables. One example
> of this is when you have a longer function, and you use "auto" in a variable
> that lives throughout the scope of the function. This means you'll need to
> go back to its declaration and try to figure out what type this particular
> variable has.
> 
> Pedro has pointed out LLVM's coding standards for "auto", which we may or
> may not want to follow/adopt: https://llvm.org/docs/CodingStandards.html#use-auto-type-deduction-to-make-code-more-readable
> 
> It sounds like a reasonable idea to me. Thoughts?

Thanks for the pointer to LLVM's CS guideline. FWIW, it's explaining
quite nicely what I had in the back of my mind. I think it would be
a good starting point, at least for discussing whathever guidelines
we might want to adopt in GDB.

> Are there other C++ constructs people think would benefit from a more formal
> style guideline? As we move to newer C++ standards over time, it is more
> likely we will start using newer constructs, and some of those may make the
> code potentially less readable.

-- 
Joel