Google C++ Style Guide Is No Good

This is presented without justification as if it must be true. But is it?

My view is that you absolutely should have different worlds. You can then limit the number of people and the amount of code using foot gun prone constructs to a very small minority, and instead provide higher level abstractions. I'd absolutely hate to see code that looks like Boost on the business layer of an application.

Google is right here; a purely build-time issue, like avoiding including a header file twice, should be solved without having to resort to nonstandard language features.

The generated code doesn't change in any way, so it is gratuitous.

Save the language extensions for doing something that is inherently nonportable, like gaining access to some platform feature.

> Although GSG does not forbid them categoricaly, it says to “Avoid using forward declarations where possible”. However forward declarations are useful in contexts like the following: ...

Yes, those are the cases where it isn't possible to avoid forward declarations, so it's fine to use them?

> While it’s true that initialization/destruction order of globals between translation units is not defined and can pose problems, this rule is overly prohibitve. Globals like this are not problematic and very useful:

No, globals like that are very problematic, so much so that there is a clang warning specifically to detect these (-Wexit-time-destructors). exit runs global destructors, so if one thread calls exit while some other thread is still doing stuff, it might destroy an object that's in use, leading to explosions. Also, if you're exiting, why are you paying to deallocate memory when it's all going to be blown away anyway?

> The lynchpin of C++ are value-types. Such types should be copyable and moveable and the language automatically generates the necessary constructors and operators by default. “a copyable class should explicitly declare the copy operations, a move-only class should explicitly declare the move operations” – this goes against the language philosophy.

It is very non-obvious which constructors will get automatically generated, because it depends on the types of the members. `Foo(Foo&& move) = default;` makes it immediately obvious.