Question

We are going to start a new project in our team which consists of less than 10 developers.
We have access to modern IDEs such as VS2010.

The project is extremely dynamic (users’ needs change very quick) and cross platform. Therefore, I need a highly readable and very detailed C++ coding standard so new developers can easily change the old codes in future. I also need a not to write list so the code will compile on different OSes (at least windows and linux).

• Is there such a standard?
• Are coding standards expired already?

Answer 1

Coding standards remain an issue because everyone secretly thinks they can solve all the world’s programming problems with a very clever coding standard. And then forcing programmers to follow them. (Pretty much like programming programmers.)

Unfortunately, few coding standards address the issues that matter in a complex project like:

• how to cleanly and effectively partition and model a problem
• how program partitions should best interact with others
• how an explanation of logic (“comment”) should be written to explain the code

Instead, most coding standards address trivia like:

• indentation and brace style
• whether comments should be present or not
• mechanical rules about constructing identifiers
• placing arbitrary limits on characters in a line, number of parameters, etc., etc.

As for the primary question, I don’t know of any good detailed standards other than design and implement code which other engineers would be proud of.