On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 9:06 AM Luis Machado via Gdb <g...@sourceware.org> 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?
The LLVM guide seems pretty similar to what the Google C++ guide *used* to say, which was basically "You can use auto for iterators and when the type is explicit on the initializer, e.g. for auto* x = new Foo()". I liked that rule. (The new version says "Use it if it makes the code more readable" with no detailed guidance, which makes me sad) Christian
