Style guide for OpenTurbine

[faisal-bhuiyan]

Coding style in OpenTurbine

What is code style? It is how we format our code, name the variables, decide when and how to write comments etc. It’s all the stuff the compiler doesn’t care about, however us, as humans reading the code, care a lot about. As the OpenTurbine codebase and the number of developers are expanding, it is a good time to deliberate on this and discuss the style-related choices to maintain consistency.

C++ is a mature language and there exist several carefully crafted style guides out there. Rather than invest a lot of time and effort into developing something from scratch, we have been taking advantage of the style guide developed by Google for a couple reasons

• This guide discusses the various topics that falls under the (rather broad) umbrella of stylistic choices at length -- current and prospective developers of OpenTurbine are encouraged to glance over it. For example, the section on how to name variables is quite helpful. An excerpt in the following

Data members of classes, both static and non-static, are named like ordinary nonmember variables, but with a trailing underscore.

class TableInfo {
  ...
 private:
  std::string table_name_;  // OK - underscore at end.
  static Pool<TableInfo>* pool_;  // OK.
};

• This style choices related to formatting can be enforced in the codebase via clang-format as a predefined style. We are already taking advantage of it, with a few exceptions to the Google style guide clearly noted.

Next steps

Feel free to bring up any stylistic choice related discussion as comments to this post. My opinion is to add a brief section on coding style to the OpenTurbine developer's guide summarizing the discussion here.