In addition, it's also more consistent with lambda syntax, lets you use decltype on parameter arguments, allows your function names to line up nicely in header

In addition, it's also more consistent with lambda syntax, lets you use decltype on parameter arguments, allows your function names to line up nicely in header files, and my favorite feature, is scoped for member functions. Ex: MessageWindow::Response MessageWindow::question(...); MessageWindow::Icon MessageWindow::getIcon() { return _icon; } ... auto MessageWindow::question(...) -> Response; auto MessageWindow::getIcon() { return _icon; } I was fairly nervous about it at first, but after using this syntax, I've grown to highly favor it. Being a huge fan of consistency, I've begun using only this style. Downside is it seems to annoy many other programmers much moreso than other style choices (like const foo vs foo const, tabs vs spaces, K&R vs 1TBS, etc.) I do kind of wish you could say "function" instead of "auto" here, but of course that wasn't a reserved keyword so it would have broken existing code. For the ubiquitous main, "auto main() {}" return type deduction works pretty well. But I need a wrapper around main() anyway thanks to Windows corrupting argv[] when you pass in non-ANSI (Unicode) characters. So for my case, I have: #include <nall/main.hpp> auto nall::main(vector<string> args) { ... } Where internally, the real main() will use CommandLineToArgvW + WideCharToMultiByte on Windows to return UTF-8 arguments. So many cross-platform apps skip this step, and make opening files named in other languages impossible via command-line.