C++ Network Library Style Guidelines

I’m starting this in response to a question raised on the mailing list.

Now, style guidelines sound like a great idea, but in practice this is going to be impossible to enforce. For one thing, any guidelines are going to be pretty much arbitrary and not easy to defend if anyone breaks them, and the project admins will probably feel it’s not a valuable use of their time. But, consistency of style is going to be vital as this project grows.

So, beyond boost’s own requirements, it’s perhaps a good idea to define what’s acceptable and not acceptable within our own project.

We follow Google’s style guidelines.

I can start with some observations I’ve made about the organisation of the directory and namespace structures:

Directory and Namespace Structure Guidelines

1. protocol specific stuff belongs in the namespace (e.g. HTTP) network::http and the directory network/http/.
2. URI specific stuff belongs in the uri submodule network namespace and directory network/uri/.
3. Implementation specific headers belong in network::*::detail network/*/detail.
4. Implementations are put in .ipp files that live alongside the .hpp files. The .ipp file is included by a .cpp file in libs/network/src/ which is then compiled.