What's the rationale for auto return type deduction and -> declaration at the same time?
For this reason, some prefer a “auto almost everywhere” style, in which you preferentially use trailing return types.
it is known as sticky syntax in relation to auto (but specifically when the type on the rhs is explicitly declared and not abstracted away with a function signature)
it removes narrowing, inference, while keeping benefits of auto related to inits etc.
it's a way of telling the compiler we want this type moving forward and adheres to the convention of right-to-left reading w.r.t. resource allocation semantics C++ programmers are often accustomed to.
Then once that was opened some folks felt it would be better to write their regular code that way too.
Ehh... not putting a return type in at all is a bridge to far IMO. Be friendly to the casual reader of the code, and help them understand what the function returns. (Yes I know IDE's can do this for you, but not everyone uses an IDE, and not everyone is reading the code in the context of an IDE... for instance code review, etc.)
Wrote this for myself, I’m a vim user :)
Sometimes it deduces "wrong". (As in not the type the coder was expecting, so really the dev was wrong and missed a possible bug)
But if your argument is "this makes the reader do extra work" then that's an argument against all uses of `auto`. Now I do consider reader clarity a legitimate (and important) design criterion (and argument in code review), but I don't think it is reasonable in this case.
In fact I consider type deduction with auto to be an important element of readability: it tells the reader not to worry about the type and focus on the logic. Then the cases when a type is explicitly specified it tells the reader that it's worth paying attention.
And you ignored any value that actually specifying the type can have.
You also ignored the age old wisdom that code is written once and read many times.
You said that people not having an IDE was "bridge too far" meaning that people should always have them. We already had examples of where that simply isn't true so your idea was demonstrated as wrong. Own it get a better idea and move on. I certainly had until I went through my past comments looking for childiah arguments and found one.