C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices

14. Prefer compile- and link-time errors to run-time errors

Summary

Don’t put off ’til run time what you can do at build time: Prefer to write code that uses the compiler to check for invariants during compilation, instead of checking them at run time. Run-time checks are control- and data-dependent, which means you’ll seldom know whether they are exhaustive. In contrast, compile-time checking is not control- or data-dependent and typically offers higher degrees of confidence.

Discussion

The C++ language offers many opportunities to “accelerate” error detection by pushing it to compilation time. Exploiting these static checking capabilities offers you many advantages, including the following:

• Static checks are data- and flow-independent: ...