cplusplus / cplusplus/draft

Consider making a new index for macro names

Open
#6,005 12 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

P3-Other
Dominant language
TeX
Stars
221
Forks
813
Avg merge
16h 4m
Merged PRs (30d)
36

Description

Macros are a very special kind of library name, that become more special in C++23.

First, by their nature as macros, they directly rewrite user source rather than participating in name lookup. It would be good to have such names collected in a single place to reference.

Secondly, the library is not the only source of macro names, given the compiler supplies some predefined macros.

Third, as of C++23, the user will not see any of those macros (other than compiler predefines) if they import std; rather than directly include library headers. I think this third point now presses the case for separating macros out of the library/compiler index, and into an index of their own.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing how the current library and compiler indexes represent macro names, then compare that structure with the C++23 import std; behavior described in the issue. Done means producing an agreed design for whether macros should have a separate index and what sources it should cover.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
cpp
Domain
documentation
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.