clang-format does account for this: if you break your includes into groups with blank lines, clang-format will sort within but not across the groups. That is, c

clang-format does account for this: if you break your includes into groups with blank lines, clang-format will sort within but not across the groups. That is, clang-format offers a crude but simple API to the programmer to express which headers have order dependency, and which don't. Given that headers can have order dependency, it is sadly part of a C++ programmer's responsibility to know which do, just as it is their responsibility to know which functions have side-effects, etc. If they are using clang-format, it is then their responsibility to communicate this knowledge to it.