CppCon 2019

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.