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Comment by geokon | Hacker News Reader

They had something like this. It was called Core Guidelines.

I think it was a bit of a misnomer b/c it sounded like some glorified style guide. But it was actually a set of tools and helpers/wrappers that effectively made it impossible to write a lot of unsafe pre-modern C++.

For whatever reason it's never really caught on, though it looks like it's still being worked on: https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines

In principle it seems to kinda strikes the right balance where the language is narrowed - it's still all valid C++ (not an entirely new thing), but not all C++ is valid under the Core Guidelines

I'll be honest - I never tried it myself so I don't know it's deficiencies. Maybe someone who's given it a good try could weight in

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I reference the cpp core guidelines all the time. It's not dead at all, things like clang-tidy make references to it constantly for rationale behind recommendations.

There's only a few things I'm not a fan of, mostly around mutable out parameters (I prefer pointers not refs to make it clear at the call site it's a potential mutation)

reference as in a style-guide? Or are you actually using the guidelines support library with things like gsl::index ? I've never seen it used in the wild

I don't use the gsl, no, but I do use linters (like clang-tidy) that enforce a decent chunk of the guide. And reference like a style guide (or any documentation really), yes.

> but I do use linters (like clang-tidy) that enforce a decent chunk of the guide. And reference like a style guide (or any documentation really), yes.

That's my experience as well. Clang-tidy, clang-format, cppcheck and Core Guidelines. I don't recall the last project I've worked that didn't used that combo.

> For whatever reason it's never really caught on

I don't believe this is true at all. I don't recall working on a single C++ for the last half dozen years which hasn't adopted the Core Guidelines up to the code review level.

Of course it's a blend of survivorship bias to claim that no project uses the Core Guidelines if you personally fail to consider it to start with.

Remarkable. This is the first time I've ever heard of the "Core Guidelines".

Seems like something I would be interested in; I've increasingly felt overwhelmed by the endlessly growing scope of C++, and the challenge of understanding which parts are and are not "Modern C++".

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