Google style guide

C++ style guide. See this page. There are a lot of very reasonable recommendations to adopt for other programming languages.

Scoping

• Place a function’s variables in the narrowest scope possible.
• Initialise variables in the declaration; declare variables close to where they’re used.
  • This means that variables needed within if, while, and for should be declared within those statements.
  • Except for objects, because the constructor/destructor would be invoked several times.

Classes

• Only use a struct for passive objects that carry data. Everything else should be a class.
• Structs are preferred to pairs or tuples whenever the elements can have meaningful names.

Functions

• Functions should be small and focused. Don’t exceed 40 lines by splitting them up.

Other C++ features

• Friends should be defined in the same file.