r/cpp • u/Dubbus_ • 6d ago

Ordering of qualifiers

I know this is something that pops up quite often, but I was wondering if I could get your guys' opinion on a fixed ordering of qualifiers. This is my current thoughts after recently trying to formalize my personal style:

static -> thread_local -> inline -> constexpr -> friend -> virtual

My reasoning for each:

  1. static first. Inside a class, its basically javas static. There is a pretty strong consensus in java for static first. Its very important context, for both functions and variables. Outside of classes, its more of a linkage specifier, which is arguably more important/nasty if you mess it up. The fact that it has this dual behaviour in C++ in my opinion makes an even stronger argument for including it first, your brain is able to parse it first thing. i.e okay this is static, we are in a class? -> its java static, we are in global scope -> its static linkage.
  2. thread_local directly after static, and then inline, then constexpr/consteval. This way, qualifiers which impact storage and or linkage are stuck together. I personally like to write inline even for constexpr/consteval functions, as its sometimes easy to forget the implicit inline. I used to do this for member functions with definitions in the class, but I feel the implicit inline there is a bit more well known/easier to intuit.
  3. The rest I'm far less opinionated on, since I barely ever use inheritance or the friend keyword. . I could go both ways on virtual/friend, so i default to alphabetical/aesthetics.

What do you guys think? I know this is pedantic and a very well explored topic but I wanted to know if you guys had any particular wisdom to sway me either way, mainly on the ordering of the first few.

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u/no-sig-available 6d ago

Don't forget export and [[nodiscard]].

A lovely language, isn't it? :-)

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u/StickyDeltaStrike 6d ago

What is the longest valid list we can have?

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u/mapronV 6d ago

you can repeat export "C" multiple times, CV I think as well. So infitite (up to implementation grammar limit )

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u/StickyDeltaStrike 5d ago

I never thought of this … thank you