C++ Coding Standard: Introduction

No matter what language you develop software in, some consistency will help make the code more readable for whoever ends up maintaining the code in the future -- even if that whoever is your future self. Furthermore, every language has strengths and weaknesses, and quirks that you can either learn yourself the hard way, or learn from others who have already done battle with the quirks.

A coding standard can help with both of these issues. Look at it as a set of guidelines that make for more maintainable code and help everyone avoid well-known language-specific pitfalls. I've done a lot of C++ work over the years, and I have a nice, concise coding standard that I've been carrying around for years. It is descended from a standard Kerry wrote when we worked together, that Brady and I distilled down and added to, and that Khalil later suggested changes to. I'm going to roll it out a section at a time in this blog.

The style is terse, consisting of numbered one-line items. Nearly every item is a "must" or a "never"; a few are "should"s; a few are exceptions to the preceding item. No rationale is given in the text of the standard itself, so as to preserve the terseness and make it easy to refer to the standard during code inspections or reviews. Of course, in blog-land I will provide some commentary for each section.

The sections are:

1. Source files
2. Header file layout
3. Header file contents
4. Implementation file layout
5. Implementation file contents
6. Class design
7. Class layout
8. Inheritance
9. Preprocessor issues
10. Naming conventions
11. Function design
12. Other stylistic issues

Finally, here is the complete standard, terse, with no commentary.