Developer Guide

Developer Guide

Information for contributors and maintainers of the ALF codebase.

Getting Started

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full community guidelines. Key points:

• ALF is released under GPL v3 with an attribution clause.
• Bug fixes and portability patches are welcome from everyone via pull requests.
• New features should be discussed in a GitHub issue first.

Access Levels

Level	Who	How to get access
User	Anyone	Clone the public repo
Contributor	Anyone	Submit a pull request
Developer (write access)	By application	Open a public issue + non-interference declaration
Core developer (owner)	By vote	Open a public issue + unanimous vote of existing owners

Development Workflow

1. Create a feature branch from master
2. Build with the devel flag for extra runtime checks: source configure.sh GNU nompi devel
3. Run the test suite (see Test Suite)
4. Update CHANGELOG.md with your changes
5. Submit a pull request — CI runs automatically

Building for Development

The devel flag in configure.sh enables:

• Array bounds checking
• Floating-point exception traps (NaN, overflow)
• Additional compiler warnings

source configure.sh GNU nompi devel
make cleanlib cleanprog
make -j5 program

Code Style

• Fortran 2008 with submodule support
• Modules use _mod suffix, submodules use _smod suffix
• Hamiltonians are submodules of Hamiltonian_main
• Use Kind=Kind(0.d0) for double precision
• MPI/OpenMP code is guarded by preprocessor macros (#ifdef MPI, #ifdef TEMPERING)

Sub-Pages

• Test Suite — Running and writing tests
• Code Architecture — Module structure and data flow
• Release Process — Versioning and release cycle