Coding standard
From OdaWiki
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 (or an explanation of why this is impossible)
- Make logical changes in separate patches
- Provide an off switch for every new feature
Code guidelines
Things you should definitely AVOID in your code:
- Changing code that already works
- 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