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?
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.
