Beautiful C++

J. Guy Davidson, head of engineering practice at Creative Assembly, works on its Total War game franchise, curates its catalogue, and improves programming standards across its engineering team. He serves on the ISO C++ committee, moderates the #include discord server, speaks at C++ events, and offers C++ mentoring support through Prospela and BAME in Games. Kate Gregory has 40+ years of development experience in multiple languages. She has keynoted on five continents, and volunteers in many C++ activities, especially #include , which is making the industry more welcoming and inclusive. Since 1986 she and her husband have run Gregory Consulting, helping clients worldwide become more effective.

List of Selected C++ Core Guidelines xiii
Foreword xv
Preface xvii
Acknowledgments xxi
About the Authors xxiii

Section 1: Bikeshedding is bad 1
Chapter 1.1: P.2: Write in ISO Standard C++ 3
Chapter 1.2: F.51: Where there is a choice, prefer default arguments over overloading 13
Chapter 1.3: C.45: Don't define a default constructor that only initializes data members; use in-class member initializers instead 23
Chapter 1.4: C.131: Avoid trivial getters and setters 31
Chapter 1.5: ES.10: Declare one name (only) per declaration 41
Chapter 1.6: NR.2: Don't insist to have only a single return-statement in a function 49

Section 2: Don't hurt yourself 59
Chapter 2.1: P.11: Encapsulate messy constructs, rather than spreading through the code 61
Chapter 2.2: I.23: Keep the number of function arguments low 71
Chapter 2.3: I.26: If you want a cross-compiler ABI, use a C-style subset 79
Chapter 2.4: C.47: Define and initialize member variables in the order of member declaration 87
Chapter 2.5: CP.3: Minimize explicit sharing of writable data 97
Chapter 2.6: T.120: Use template metaprogramming only when you really need to 107

Section 3: Stop using that 119
Chapter 3.1: I.11: Never transfer ownership by a raw pointer (T*) or reference (T&) 121
Chapter 3.2: I.3: Avoid singletons 129
Chapter 3.3: C.90: Rely on constructors and assignment operators, not memset and memcpy 139
Chapter 3.4: ES.50: Don't cast away const 149
Chapter 3.5: E.28: Avoid error handling based on global state (e.g. errno)159
Chapter 3.6: SF.7: Don't write using namespace at global scope in a header file 169

Section 4: Use this new thing properly 179
Chapter 4.1: F.21: To return multiple "out" values, prefer returning a struct or tuple 181
Chapter 4.2: Enum.3: Prefer class enums over "plain" enums 193
Chapter 4.3: ES.5: Keep scopes small 201
Chapter 4.4: Con.5: Use constexpr for values that can be computed at compile time 213
Chapter 4.5: T.1: Use templates to raise the level of abstraction of code 225
Chapter 4.6: T.10: Specify concepts for all template arguments 235

Section 5: Write code well by default 45
Chapter 5.1: P.4: Ideally, a program should be statically type safe 247
Chapter 5.2: P.10: Prefer immutable data to mutable data 259
Chapter 5.3: I.30: Encapsulate rule violations 267
Chapter 5.4: ES.22: Don't declare a variable until you have a value to initialize it with 275
Chapter 5.5: Per.7: Design to enable optimization 285
Chapter 5.6: E.6: Use RAII to prevent leaks 293

Envoi 305
Afterword 307

Index 309