Coding_guidelines.md

Coding guidelines

This document is intended to encourage good coding practices without inhibiting progress. Rules herein should be open ended to allow the author to "do better".

The main rules in order of importance:

1. Readability and maintenance.
2. Robustness.
3. Performance.

Old code is often breaking rules and should be rewritten when time permits.

Hard rules

Indent with tabs.

Readability

• Ensure horizontal and vertical whitespace.
• Form parameters as lists.
• Symmetry.
• Reduce complexity.
• camelCase -> snake_case.
• Remove noise
  • ::getName() -> ::name()
  • liberal use of "using namespace"

robustness

• Immutable.
• Avoid pointers.
• Pass by value.
• No naked new.
• No null.
• No unscoped "using namespace" in header files

Conventions

• Indent with tabs.
• snake_case.
• lover case filenames.
• No prefix or postfix on variables and fields if possible.
  • If fields and method names collide we concatenate "_" on the field.
  • If parameter and field name collides concatenate "_" on parameter.

Code example

void Preference_dialog::on_data_changed()
{
  get_values();
  if (gz < gt
    &&
    (
      gz              != old_gz              ||
      gt              != old_gt              ||
      compact_layout  != old_compact_layout  ||
      start_minimized != old_start_minimized ||
      password        != old_password        ||
      user            != old_user            ||
      url             != old_url             ||
      ignore_cert_err != old_ignore_cert_err ||
      sync_interval   != old_sync_interval   ||
      quiet_mode      != old_quiet_mode
    ))
  {
    ok_button.set_sensitive(true);
  }
  else
  {
    ok_button.set_sensitive(false);
  }
}