Registration is now open for CppCon 2021, which starts on October 24 and will be held both in person and online. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting videos of some of the top-rated talks from our most recent in-person conference in 2019 and our online conference in 2020. Here’s another CppCon talk video we hope you will enjoy – and why not register today for CppCon 2021 to attend in person, online, or both!

Compiled C++ Coding Standards

by Valentin Galea

Summary of the talk:

Coding conventions, guidelines and standards are a perennial effort of software development. Lots of work goes into preparing and writing them but arguably less in following them - partly because these are documents usually maintained outside of main development, so they evolve separately and often retroactively.

We will show a novel model whereby the coding standard chosen by a team is a 'live' source code file integrated into a production repository so that it participates in compilation. This immediately brings a couple of advantages that we will explore in detail, as well as the implications it has in the context of a full team of developers.

As a practical example, the coding standard files of Splash Damage - a game development company - will be shown and discussed, detailing the various C++ aspects they deal with it and the techniques encouraged therein. Going further than the code, we'll talk about the human factor and how standards are written, evolved and championed across a large company in the face of different constraints between projects and teams.