* "auto main() -> int" could be just "int main()".
* "auto v = vector<int>(20);" could be just "vector<int> v(20)".
* "auto print_value = [](auto&& v)" could be (I'd argue should be) "auto print_value = [](const auto& v)".
"auto" is useful, "auto" is great. But "auto" is not an end in and of itself.
(Bring on the C++(11) haters, blah blah.)
2. Some people argue that
auto v = T{x};
In C++14 I'll extend support to lambdas in some cases but will need to experiment to say for sure.
There is a pretty good argument for using the
auto var = T{val};
Maybe you have a good reason for not liking the style and there certainly can be arguments against it. But from experience I find that many people opposing more use of auto simply oppose it because it is different to their old ways. Therefore I'd like to see a proper argument for your comment.
This sort of thing:
auto x = function();
is so unhelpful
I find it frustrating and an active impediment when I can look at an object being created and not know what kind of object it is. In some programming languages, knowing what kind of object something is doesn't matter so much. Not the case here.
Okay, YOU tell me what class functions that variable "x" has. Code isn't written just for the compiler to read.
My experience is working on video game engines with other people. As a senior developer a large part of my job is jumping through a wide range of systems written by other people to debug problems, identify ways to increase performance, add features, etc. There's also a lot of code written by people who have moved on to other jobs.
We've had quite a bit of code that was full of autos. In my experience thus far auto has never made code more significantly readable or easier to understand than not using auto. (excluding iterators/lambdas) Not only has auto not made code easier to comprehend the use of auto has made it significantly more difficult to understand on more than a few contexts. If deducing a type as a human reader of text requires backtracing a half dozen calls of code across who knows how many lines of code, and even files, then I'm gonna be justifiably grumpy. It's a huge burden. And for what benefit? Damn near nothing in my experience so far.
I now do 100% of code editing in Sublime Text. Other people use other text editors. I'm now of the opinion that code bases should be useable and searchable in plaintext form. It's not difficult and even with an IDE makes things better imo.
C++ support in VS is horrible, that's correct, but having the ability to be supported by compiler services that can parse (invalid) code is a major milestone when it comes to handling more complex codebases.
It does not matter how smart you are, the easier it is for you to understand and reason about the code, the more will fit in your head.
Refactoring is just one of the many amazing tools that make me a much better and more productive programmer today then I was without when using vi in the 90s. Add in static analysis, intellisense etc... Every bit of complexity that tooling can hide from you is worth gold.
Reality for C++ is grim though in this regard. Let's hope we get better compiler services for it soon.
No, it's C++11.
https://github.com/CppCon/CppCon2014/blob/master/Presentatio...