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Sometimes types shouldn't be explicitly written out in code because they're a very important part of the logic. If I write generic (templated) code that returns the heat capacity of a gas mixture at a given temperature, sometimes I just want that temperature to be a
doubleso I can get a quick answer for a point's heat capacity, and other times I want it to be aVector<DualNumber<double, SparseVector<int, double>>>so I can get SIMD or GPU code that gives me a hundred points' heat capacities as well as their derivatives with respect to the input data that was used to calculate temperature. There's basically no way I'm writing intermediate data types for such a calculation as anything butauto.When designing even simpler library methods I'm also sadly kind of a fan of users writing
autoout of laziness, too. If I ever accidentally expose too much of my internal data structures, use too small of a data type, etc. and have to change the API later, often I can change it in such a way that lazyautousers are still fully compatible with the upgraded version, but users who explicitly wrotefoo::iteratorcan't compile after my switch tobar, and users who explicitly wroteintare now slicing my beautiful newsize_tand are going to be unhappy years later when they run a problem big enough to overflow 2^31.You make some good points, and I don't hate all uses of
auto(I'll usually use it for iterators, too). Though making it so your code silently compiles when a library API changes isn't something I really approve of - it's not hard to see how that can go bad. Note that one of the things Rust does way, way better than C++ is package management - you don't have to update a library until you want to, and you can handle any compile errors at that time. As for your last scenario, another advantage Rust has over C++ is that it won't silently allow it to compile, since Rust has almost no implicit type conversions. I approve: Numbers changing types lossily is something that should be done explicitly.More options
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