Guidelines

C++ Style manual for the project

How to read this document

each point will be adressed in the following form:

• Guideline instruction

//Examples

Motivations of the instruction

General considerations

• Code, comments, commit messages ... everything in English please.
• These rules are meants to maintain cohesion and facilitate readability and integration in the project. They can be brocken if there is a good reason for it. In doubt you can contact Nicolas Silva (nical.silva@gmail.com).
• Always privilegiate object-oriented design and implementation.
• Try to limitate dependencies by not relying on other external libraries than boost and the c++ standard library.
• Kiwi is meant to be cross-platfrorm. Do not rely on non cross-platform dependencies.
• Kiwi is free. Beware of the License when adding content to the library.

Naming conventions

• Namespaces names should be all lower case

namespace kiwi
{
namespace core
{
...
}//namespace
}//namespace

Common practice.

• All classes should be in a namespace nested inside kiwi's namespace. Each subproject should have it's own namespace.

kiwi::core::Node
kiwi::generic::MultiArrayContainer
kiwi::text::TextContainer

Avoid eventual name collisions and separate each sub-project.

• Class names must be mixed case starting with upper case letter.

class Node ...
class AbstractArrayContainer ...

Common practice.

• Member functions names must be mixed case starting with lowercase letter.

kiwi::uint32_t getChar();
bool connect(...);

Common practice.

• Function/method parameters must be mixed case starting with lower case letter.

void add( kiwi::core::Node* toAdd);

Common practice.

• Protected or private member varaible names must be mixed case starting with an underscore '_' followed by a lower case letter.

Container* _linkedContainer;
kiwi::Point<float, 2> _position;

Common practice, makes it easy to differentiate member varibles from parameters.

• Constants and enumerated values must be upper case with underscores to separate words.

// within class declaration
enum{NODE, FILTER, CONTAINER}; 

Common practice. Constants should not be declared outside classes, so that they remain within the classes' namespace.