Development Team/Coding Standards/new

This document gives coding conventions for the C code comprising many of DareNET's development projects.

Note, rules are there to be broken. Two good reasons to break a particular rule:

1. When applying the rule would make the code less readable, even for someone who is used to reading the code that follows the rules.
2. To be consistent with surrounding code that also breaks it (maybe for historic reasons) -- although this is also an opportunity to clean up someone else's mess.

C dialect

• While you may use C99, keep in mind that variable length arrays and macros with variable number of parameters are not well supported amongst most compilers. If you use these features, ensure you account for this (see services-darenet's HelpServ module for an example).

• GCC is the compiler we use for almost all our testing. We recommend you use it as well. However, while use of GCC extensions are not prohibited, we don't necessarily encourage their use either.

• Never use C++ style // single line comments.

Indentation

Tabs, tabs, ONLY tabs. Use one tab for each level of indentation. Spaces should ONLY be used for alignment, not indentation.

Preference: Tabs are 8 characters, and thus indentations are also 8 characters. There are heretic movements that try to make indentations 4 (or even 2!) characters deep, and that is akin to trying to define the value of PI to be 3.

Rationale: The whole idea behind indentation is to clearly define where a block of control starts and ends. Especially when you've been looking at your screen for 20 straight hours, you'll find it a lot easier to see how the indentation works if you have large indentations.

Now, some people will claim that having 8-character indentations makes the code move too far to the right, and makes it hard to read on a 80-character terminal screen. The answer to that is that if you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program.

In short, 8-char indents make things easier to read, and have the added benefit of warning you when you're nesting your functions too deep. Heed that warning.

Braces

The other issue that always comes up in C styling is the placement of braces. Unlike the indent size, there are few technical reasons to choose one placement strategy over the other, but the preferred way, as shown to us by the prophets Kernighan and Ritchie, is to put the opening brace last on the line, and put the closing brace first, thusly:

if (x is true) {
        we do y
}

However, there is one special case, namely functions: they have the opening brace at the beginning of the next line, thus:

 int function(int x)
{
        body of function
}

Heretic people all over the world have claimed that this inconsistency is ... well ... inconsistent, but all right-thinking people know that (a) K&R are right and (b) K&R are right. Besides, functions are special anyway (you can't nest them in C).

Note that the closing brace is empty on a line of its own, except in the cases where it is followed by a continuation of the same statement, i.e. a "while" in a do-statement or an "else" in an if-statement, like this:

do {
        body of do-loop
} while (condition);

and

if (x == y) {
        ..
} else if (x > y) {
        ...
} else {
        ....
}

Rationale: K&R.

Also, note that this brace-placement also minimizes the number of empty (or almost empty) lines, without any loss of readability. Thus, as the supply of new-lines on your screen is not a renewable resource (think 25-line terminal screens here), you have more empty lines to put comments on.

Naming

C is a Spartan language, and so should your naming be. Unlike Modula-2 and Pascal programmers, C programmers do not use cute names like ThisVariableIsATemporaryCounter. A C programmer would call that variable tmp, which is much easier to write, and not the least more difficult to understand.

However, while mixed-case names are frowned upon, descriptive names for global variables are a must. To call a global function foo is a shooting offense.

Global variables (to be used only if you really need them) need to have descriptive names, as do global functions. If you have a function that counts the number of active users, you should call that count_active_users() or similar, you should not call it cntusr().

Encoding the type of a function into the name (so-called Hungarian notation) is brain damaged - the compiler knows the types anyway and can check those, and it only confuses the programmer. No wonder Microsoft makes buggy programs.

Local variable names should be short, and to the point. If you have some random integer loop counter, it should probably be called i. Calling it loop_counter is counterproductive, if there is no chance of it being mis-understood. Similarly, tmp can be just about any type of variable that is used to hold a temporary value.

If you are afraid to mix up your local variable names, you have another problem, which is called the function-growth-hormone-imbalance syndrome. See next section.