CppCon 2014: Titus Winters "The Philosophy of Google's C++ Code"

The Google C++ Style Guide is a popular guide for C++ coding practices, but some of its recommendations appear dated and have sparked controversy and tension with modern C++ practices. In this talk we focus on the core philosophies underlying the guide, from the common principle of consistency to the unusual practice of leaving an explicit trace for the reader, and debunk the notion that Google's C++ is anything less than modern. We discuss how these core ideas inform contentious rules such as "No non-const references" and "Don't use exceptions," and how applying those rules has worked in practice for developers and reliability engineers. Titus Winters, who has spent the past three years working on Google's core C++ libraries, shares his experience with maintaining a codebase of over 100 million lines of code, keeping it consistent and flexible for the next decade, and pioneering automated code transformations on a massive scale.