Note: The following guidelines are extracted from various sources (see "References" for all list) mainly from "C++ Core Guidelines by Bjarne Stroustrup, Herb Sutter, July 28, 2016" based on Robomongo project's needs and code structure.

General

• Keep things private as much as possible. (member variables, functions etc..)
• Use "const" a lot. Try to refactor "non-const" to "const" where possible (variables, functions, anything possible..)
• Always try to initialize a variable with default value. (built-in type variables (i.e. int, int*) may/will have garbage values when un-initialized which might result with insidious bugs)
• Make sure member variables are all initialized (uninitialized variables may have undefined values)

Resource Management

• Use C++11 smart pointers (unique, shared, weak) instead of explicit(naked) new and delete.
• Avoid using explicit (naked, non-RAII) new and delete. (strong memory leak candidate)
• If "new & delete" must be used, wrap in ctor and dtor for automatic clean up (RAII).
• Keep using raw pointers (T*) for non-owning purposes.
• Do not use smart pointers(owning ptrs) for the purpose of raw(non-owning) pointers (T*).

Concurrency

• Share the copy of object across threads. Avoid passing pointer or reference to an object (local variable, class member.. any thread object) across different threads.

...

References

C++ Core Guidelines by Bjarne Stroustrup, Herb Sutter, July 28, 2016

• https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppCoreGuidelines.md

Scott Meyer's guideline-based books on C++ (https://www.aristeia.com/)

• Effective Modern C++, Scott Meyers, 2014
• Effective C++, Third Edition, 2005
• Effective STL, 2001
• More Effective C++, 1996

C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices Nov 4, 2004
by Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu

...

Also see: https://github.com/Studio3T/robomongo/wiki/Static-Code-Analysis/

Spell Checker

• We use spell checking for all text (user/programmer visible texts and comments).
• Following tool does a pretty good job to ensure this: Visual Studio Spell Checker