Banned C++ features in Chromium

Nothing particularly notable here. A lot of it seems to be 'We have something in-house designed for our use cases, use that instead of the standard lib equivalent'.

The rest looks very reasonable, like avoiding locale-hell.

Some of it is likely options that sand rough edges off of the standard lib, which is reasonable.

Seeing the comments here talking about ancient codebases got me wistful for when Chromium was new and everything seemed possible.

That triggered a flash of feeling extremely old realizing we broke ground on this codebase 20 years ago this year!

There are yet more interesting docs in the parent directory :)

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/styleg...

You almost never see a list of banned Java features (or even banned C# features). On the other hand any serious C++ development team is going to have a list of banned features. Java eliminated the features that you would want to ban.

Where does it list the preferred alternatives to banned features?

For example:

> The <filesystem> header, which does not have sufficient support for testing, and suffers from inherent security vulnerabilities.

Exceptions are banned, but an exception is made for Windows.

This list is longer than the features in all of C I feel like at first glance. Wow that is overwhelming.

Is there a way to make this formal, like in the code, making the compiler complain when you try to use these features?

I'd curious about the banned Rust features. Surely, Rust has at lot fewer foot guns, but it isn't that there aren't any.

The banned list proves that context matters more than having the newest tools. These features work well for small apps but they cause problems in a project this size.

Good call on those u8"..." literals.

Source code should all be UTF-8 natively, letting you directly write UTF-8 text between quotes.

Exactly their rationale.

These literals are a solution in search of a problem ... which is real but has a much better solution.

Rust is too complicated!!11 Ooops wrong thread.

It's remarkable to me how many codebases ban exceptions and yet, somehow, people still insist they're good.

Since Chromium stopped allowing manifest-v2 extensions, i.e. significantly crippled what extensions can do and made it impossible to use some key extensions like uBlock Origin, I've decided to avoid it.

Anyway, about these C++ conventions - to each software house its own I guess. I don't think banning exceptions altogether is appropriate; and I don't see the great benefit of using abseil (but feel free to convince me it's really that good.)

Modules are banned - they should have just copied D modules.

C++ itself should be forever banned