GSL: Guideline support library

The GSL is a small library of facilities designed to support this set of guidelines. Without these facilities, the guidelines would have to be far more restrictive on language details.

The Core Guidelines support library is defined in namespace gsl and the names may be aliases for standard library or other well-known library names. Using the (compile-time) indirection through the gsl namespace allows for experimentation and for local variants of the support facilities.

The GSL is header only, and can be found at GSL: Guideline support library. The support library facilities are designed to be extremely lightweight (zero-overhead) so that they impose no overhead compared to using conventional alternatives. Where desirable, they can be "instrumented" with additional functionality (e.g., checks) for tasks such as debugging.

These Guidelines assume a variant type, but this is not currently in GSL because the design is being actively refined in the standards committee.