CppCon 2026

The C++ Core Guidelines is quickly gaining popularity as the main C++ coding standard in the industry. The official introduction of the standard states the following: "Many of the rules are designed to be supported by an analysis tool. One way of thinking about these guidelines is as a specification for tools that happens to be readable by humans."

We took up this challenge: we built the tools, implemented a subset of the C++ Core Guidelines, and applied them to more than 8,000 industrial embedded software projects. That was not an easy undertaking, because the defined “rule enforcements” contain all kinds of caveats, shortcomings, unclarities, exceptions etc.

During this talk, we will explore the conceptual obstacles we encountered during implementation, how we have addressed them, and what remains to be done to make the C++ Core Guidelines the de facto standard in C++ programming.