[gmx-developers] C++ decisions - header file extension - use of bool

[Teemu Murtola]

Hi,

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 9:49 AM, David van der Spoel
<spoel at xray.bmc.uu.se>wrote:

> First is about header file name. Since we will for the foreseeable future
> at least have both C and C++ code it would be good in my opinion to have a
> clear distinction in file names. The C++ files have extension .cpp
> throughout, but the header files are .h. I would like to propose to mv
> those to .hpp.
>

I seem to recall that this was discussed back in 2009, and the decision was
to have a single .h extension (e.g., the wiki pages, written mainly at that
time, talk about .c/.cpp, but only of .h). If you want to revert that
decision (or some other guidelines), I suggest you also factor in the
effort that converting existing code (~200 files and ~70k lines) to the new
rules. While not that big in this case, it is still annoying to try to
track guidelines that seem to change every time someone starts to work on
C++ code... That said, I don't have that strong feelings about this
particular header extension. You should still specify when a header should
have which extension. E.g., if a header has a bunch of code behind #ifdef
__cplusplus, and is otherwise C-compatible, what should it be? I suspect
that this kind of headers will be common during a transition period (which
can be quite long...). Right now, smalloc.h is an example.

Second is the use of bool versus gmx_bool. I was convinced at first that
> bool was the way to go, but of course this is not portable to C code, so it
> is probably better to stick with gmx_bool.


I'm not sure what you are suggesting here. I'm not sure what we want to do
with C compatibility in the long run, but given that gmx_bool behaves badly
with equality comparison (both in C and C++ code) and with overloading (in
C++ code), I think it is a worse alternative than bool in code that is not
forced to be C compatible. The only advantage I see with gmx_bool is the
behavior of std::vector<bool> vs std::vector<gmx_bool> (which most people
wouldn't probably notice, though, so it is very minor issue). Would you
really want to ban using a basic C++ feature that can actually help catch
very unintuitive errors?

Teemu
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