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CppCoreGuidelines
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isocpp / CppCoreGuidelines

CppCoreGuidelines

The C++ Core Guidelines are a set of tried-and-true guidelines, rules, and best practices about coding in C++

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Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
85Distinct people
100Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
45.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

The C++ Core Guidelines are a set of tried-and-true guidelines, rules, and best practices about coding in C++

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

Once you've become familiar with the basics of the language, I highly recommend taking a look at C++ Core Guidelines https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines

filereaper used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year100 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-09-16 08:12:12 UTC to 2026-01-26 15:51:17 UTC.

051015202015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 21 mentions; 11 submissions, 10 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 20 mentions; 2 submissions, 18 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 0 submissions, 12 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 16 mentions; 3 submissions, 13 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 1 submissions, 9 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211110
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC20218
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC12012
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC16313
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1019
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 12, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
"Within C++ is a smaller, simpler, safer language struggling to get out." -- Bjarne Stroustrup The C++ Core Guidelines are a collaborative effort led by Bjarne Stroustrup, much like the C++ language itself. They are the result of many person-years of discussion and design across a number of organizations. Their design encourages general applicability and broad adoption but they can be freely copied and modified to meet your organization's needs. Getting started The guidelines themselves are found at CppCoreGuidelines. The document is in GH-flavored MarkDown. It is intentionally kept simple, mostly in ASCII, to allow automatic post-processing such as language translation and reformatting. The editors maintain one version formatted for browsing. Note that it is manually integrated and can be slightly older than the version in the master branch. The Guidelines are a constantly evolving document without a strict "release" cadence. Bjarne Stroustrup periodically reviews the document and increments the version number in the introduction. Checkins that increment the version number are tagged in git. Many of the guidelines make use of the header-only Guidelines Support Library. One implementation is available at GSL: Guidelines Support Library. Background and scope The aim of the guidelines is to help people to use modern C++ effectively. By "modern C++" we mean C++11 and newer. In other words, what would you like your code to look like in 5 years' time, given that you can start now? In 10 years' time? The guidelines are focused on relatively higher-level issues, such as interfaces, resource management, memory management, and concurrency. Such rules affect application architecture and library design. Following the rules will lead to code that is statically type-safe, has no resource leaks, and catches many more programming logic errors than is common in code today. And it will run fast -- you can afford to do things right. We are less concerned with low-level issues, such as naming conventions and indentation style. However, no topic that can help a programmer is out of bounds. Our initial set of rules emphasizes safety (of various forms) and simplicity. They may very well be too strict. We expect to have to introduce more exceptions to better accommodate real-world needs. We also need more rules. You will find some of the rules contrary to your expectations or even contrary to your experience. If we haven't suggested that you change your coding style in any way, we have failed! Please try to verify or disprove rules! In particular, we'd really like to have some of our rules backed up with measurements or better examples. You will find some of the rules obvious or even trivial. Please remember that one purpose of a guideline is to help someone who is less experienced or coming from a different background or language to get up to speed. The rules are designed to be supported by an analysis tool. Violations of rules will be flagged with references (or links) to the relevant rule. We do not expect you to memorize all the rules before trying to write code. The rules are meant for gradual introduction into a code base. We plan to build tools for that and hope others will too. Contributions and LICENSE Comments and suggestions for improvements are most welcome. We plan to modify and extend this document as our understanding improves and the language and the set of available libraries improve. More details are found at CONTRIBUTING and LICENSE. Thanks to DigitalOcean for hosting the Standard C++ Foundation website.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

12 sources
pjmlp·Oct 24, 2017
There is ongoing work to have linters advice on the Core Guidelines items, which are considered the best practices. https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines For those that aren't aware, actually some of the input from Microsoft side was based in the work done with Midori and having System C# ideas applied to C++. VC++ with the code checkers and clang with clang-tidy. Not sure about the current state of gcc or other commercial C++ compilers.
In C++17 Is Here: Interview with Herb Sutter
sclangdon·Jun 26, 2017
When this article refers to the term "modern C++" it seems to be talking about Andrei Alexandrescu's now 16 year old notion of modern C++ [1], not the C++11 and newer notion [2]. [1] Addmittedly, Andrei's notion is still completely relevant today (and still, imo, the best C++ book available) but I don't think it's what most people think of when they hear the term "modern c++" these days. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_C%2B%2B_Design [2] https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppC...
In Does the Boost library meet its original goal?
partycoder·Jun 4, 2017
These coding guidelines might be a good idea overall but they do not seem very specific to C++. You could take the same guidelines and apply them to C, Ada, Obj-C, Pascal, etc. If you look for C++ specific guidelines I suggest this: https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppC... I am saying this since C++ gives you a lot of power, but also a lot of responsibility and room for error making a more specific guide a very desirable thing. Then, you don't use INT_MAX anymore, you use std::numeric_limits<int>::max()
In C++ Coding Guidelines (2014)
corysama·Mar 28, 2017
The C++ Core Guidelines Checker, in combination with the Guidelines Support Library, is supposed to bring Rust-like memory safety guarantees to C++. Has anyone here had a chance to try it out? https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppC... https://github.com/Microsoft/GSL https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt762841.aspx https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2016/10/12/cppcorech... Microsoft has been embracing the idea. But, the GSL and Checker are both compiler-independent.
In It’s time for a memory safety intervention
jug·Mar 25, 2017
Boy... Would be a nice time to learn C++ again. I mean modern C++, with all lessons learned, all revisions thus far assumed to be supported, officially and unofficially deprecated coding styles marked in helpful tidy little "Don't do this and this is why!" red warning boxes. Bjarne Stroustrup himself said C++11... _11_ almost felt like a new language, and here we are already! C++ is so big, and not only that, changing so much. I have a hard time catching up and a distilled "sum of knowledge" C++ programming language guide would be immensely helpful. C++17 including all its predecessors almost feel more like D at this point, soon enough only missing GC compared to that, which by itself have alternatives in modern C++ that some argue is even better. I also think there's a disconnect in how people perceive C++ today. Many seem to think of a
Read the rest
n archaic language, Quora questions "Are C++ worthwile to learn today?" abound... Another argument for a high visibility language guide being useful? Documents like these are helpful but not very easy to digest: https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppC...
In C++ 17 is Done

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