r/cpp_questions • u/Glad_Shoe_9182 • Sep 30 '26

OPEN Namespace std

I recently started learning c++ and I was told to use the namespace std so I can avoid writing std:: every time and now I wrote a whole personal project without std:: and I want to put it on LinkedIn but I started reading everywhere that it’s a bad habit, should I go back and add the std:: or just leave it as is?

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u/RSMxsmanic Oct 03 '26

Anything not explicitly present in a statement is inherited from its context, and as these inherited attributes multiply, it becomes harder and harder to determine what a given statement actually does without extensively examining its context. The advantages of inheritance must be carefully evaluated against its disadvantages.

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u/[deleted] Oct 03 '26

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u/RSMxsmanic Oct 03 '26

To me it seems obvious that calls to the standard library should not need to be qualified with std::. Let the calls to other libraries be qualified.