Question

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Is excessive use of this in C++ a code smell

Years ago, I got in the habit of using this-> when accessing member variables. I knew it wasn’t strictly necessary, but I thought it was more clear.

Then, at some point, I started to prefer a more minimalistic style and stopped this practice…

Recently I was asked by one of my more junior peers whether I thought it was a good idea and I found that I didn’t really have a good answer for my preference… Is this really a wholly stylistic choice or are there real reasons why not prefixing this-> on member variable accesses is better?

Answer 1

While this is a totally subjective question, I think the general C++ community prefers not to have this->. Its cluttering, and entirely not needed.

Some people use it to differentiate between member variables and parameters. A much more common practice is to just prefix your member variables with something, like a single underscore or an m, or m_, etc.

That is much easier to read, in my opinion. If you need this-> to differentiate between variables, you’re doing it wrong. Either change the parameter name (from x to newX) or have a member variable naming convention.

Consistency is preferred, so instead of forcing this-> on yourself for the few cases you need to differentiate (note in initializer lists this is completely well-defined: x(x), where the member x is initialized by the parameter x), just get better variable names.

This leaves the only time I use this: when I actually need the address of the instance, for whatever reason.