RFC: 8247976: Update HotSpot Style Guide for C++14 adoption

[Kim Barrett]

> On Jun 24, 2020, at 3:01 PM, Jesper Wilhelmsson <jesper.wilhelmsson at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> I agree that the Developers' Guide would be a good place for this document. There is already a discussion on guide-dev about including the Java coding style guide and there are plans to add style guides for our Markdown and Makefiles as well.
> 
> If we can reduce the number of places one has to look to find this kind of information I think everyone will benefit in the end.

That's an interesting idea. The Developers' Guide is a new Project and
I haven't had much time to pay attention to it. Also, some of the
early discussion and the Charter suggested to me it wasn't the place
for this kind of document. For example, "It contains tutorial-style
text that provides step-by-step directions..." and I would in no way
describe the HotSpot Style Guide that way. But I've now found other
discussion in the other direction.

I think hosting this document somewhere other than the current wiki
page would be beneficial for a number of reasons.

One concern I have with hosting in the Developers' Guide is that the
new HotSpot Style Guide is at least somewhat version specific;
substantial chunks of it do not apply to earlier JDK releases (unless
someone does the hard work of backporting C++14 support and forcing
required compiler versions forward and such).  Any idea how that might
be addressed?

I'm also not sure I understand how "ownership" and decisions around
updates work for the Developers' Guide. There's never been a clear
mechanism for updating the HotSpot Style Guide, so the new document
contains a proposal for such. But that might be incompatible with the
Project's processes. In particular, I think it's important that the
HotSpot Style Guide "belongs to" the HotSpot Group.