Revision as of 14:16, 5 May 2008

Overview

Odamex relies on a coding standard to ensure continuity, this reduces bugs and provides easy readability of the code.

Requirements

• Add a test for every change
• Do not fix code that already works
• Make logical changes in separate patches

Code guidelines

Things you should definitely AVOID in your code:

• Precompiler macros
• Global variables (they can create problems elsewhere in code)
• Variants (tagged unions) - they can present a performance problem
• Magic numbers (use #define or const in your code for fixed numbers, at the top of files)
• Hungarian notation (just plan evil)
• C style strings. (replace them with C++ types where it is safe to do so)
• goto

Formatting guidelines

• If creating a new file, include a GPL header at the top of it, as seen in other files.
• Descriptive comments
• Comments of reasonable size. (not too big and not too small)
• Comment formatting. (in c/c++, either // for 1 liners or /* */ for multiple lines)
• Indentations to be of 1 tab character, using 4 space width tabs
• Be sure your editor/IDE's EOL mode is LF, not CRLF or CR
• 80 line character limit, for devs with text-based editors
• if you can, limit functions to a maximum size (like the amount that would fit on a monitor with a reasonable screen resolution)

What you should strive for:

• Clarity of code
• Defensive and secure coding practices
• Maintain traditional naming conventions, for consistency

External Links

• tabs-vs-spaces