I noticed today that we don’t have any preferred casting style documented in the coding standards, contrary to my belief: I’ve been asking people to use C+±style casting for as long as I can remember, thinking that was explicitly stated as preferred somewhere.
In most cases, I believe C+±style casts are superior to C-style casts, due to the additional safety checks they come with, yet I regularly see patches containing the latter. I think we need to be explicit about our preferred style and when contributors should diverge from it. I believe the only case we should diverge from the C+±style is for casting to void to suppress unused variable warnings (this is actually covered in the coding standards, under the section on assertions, albeit indirectly).
I’ve created a patch to add this to the document and would appreciate feedback:
So do I, but I don’t think forbidding C-style casts is a reasonable step to take if most developers are uncomfortable with it. IMO it is purely a stylistic issue and should be judged accordingly, i.e. by voting.
(I’ll probably lose anyway because most people just don’t care or trust cppcoreguidelines too much, but I will know that I tried )
I witnessed many bugs caused by C-casts hiding necessary refactoring changes. Saving a few characters is not worth all the potential debugging time down the road.
I am supportive of this. I have had mixed reactions to comments to use C++ style casts in the past, mostly along the lines that C++ style casts are too verbose. I think the change in the PR is a step in the right direction.
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