C auto keyword Why is it magic

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Auto has always been a strange storage duration specifier that served no purpose in all of the materials I used to learn C++.

However, I recently came across code that used it as a type name by itself.

I tried it out of curiosity, and it takes on the type of whatever I assign to it!

STL iterators and, well, anything that uses templates is suddenly ten times easier to write.

It's as if I'm programming in a 'fun' language like Python.

Where have I been looking for this keyword my entire life?

Will you break my heart by telling me it's only available in Visual Studio or that it's not portable?
Jun 6, 2022 in C++ by Nicholas
• 7,760 points
683 views

1 answer to this question.

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Auto was a keyword that C++ "inherited" from C and had been around for a long time but was almost never used because there were only two possibilities: it wasn't allowed or it was assumed by default.

C++11 introduced the usage of auto to denote an inferred type.

Similarly to how template type deduction works for function templates, auto x = initializer deduces the type of x from the type of initializer. 

Consider the following function template:

template<class T>
int whatever(T t) { 
    // point A
};

T has been allocated a type at point A based on the value supplied for whatever's argument. 

When you execute auto x = initializer;, the type for x is deduced from the type of initializer that was used to initialize it.

This implies that for every compiler that attempted to implement C++98/03, much of the type deduction mechanisms needed to construct auto were already present and utilised for templates. 

As a result, adding support for auto appears to have been rather simple for virtually all compiler teams—it was implemented rapidly, and there appear to have been few errors associated with it.

answered Jun 21, 2022 by Damon
• 4,960 points

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