Coding style for C++ constructs going forward
Nathan Sidwell
nathan@acm.org
Tue Aug 11 13:55:10 GMT 2020
On 8/7/20 10:06 AM, Luis Machado via Gcc wrote:
> Hi,
>
> 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?
I agree, it's the way I use auto. I particularly like the
auto *foo = expr;
idiom, when you're getting a pointer, but the type of the pointee is
clear. It informs how you use 'foo'.
>
> 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.
--
Nathan Sidwell
More information about the Gdb
mailing list