CppCoreGuidelines

A set of tried and true guidelines, rules, and best practices for coding in C++, led by Bjarne Stroustrup. The document opens with the claim that a smaller, simpler, safer language is struggling to get out.

The README starts with a Stroustrup line that calls C++ a container for a smaller, simpler, safer language struggling to get out. It is the kind of quote that tells you what the authors believe before they state a single rule. The rest of the document is organized around that conviction. The quote is doing double duty, as a slogan and as a description of what the guidelines are trying to find.

The guidelines are a collaborative effort led by Bjarne Stroustrup, much like the C++ language itself. The README describes them as the result of many person-years of discussion and design across a number of organizations. The design encourages general applicability and broad adoption, but the document can be freely copied and modified to meet an organization's own needs.

The guidelines live in a GH-flavored Markdown document, intentionally kept simple and mostly ASCII to allow automatic post processing such as language translation and reformatting. The editors maintain one version formatted for browsing, which is manually integrated and can be slightly older than the version in the master branch. That is a useful detail for anyone trying to figure out which copy is current.

There is no strict release cadence. The guidelines are a constantly evolving document, with Stroustrup periodically reviewing it and incrementing the version number in the introduction. Checkins that increment the version number are tagged in git, which gives the evolving document at least one stable marker.

• Source 1 · Project repository
• Source 2 · README