Style Guide

Style Guide

Here you will find the style guide for edb. If you are considering submitting a PR, please do you best to meet this guidelines. It is worth noting that edb has been in development for a while now, and has had its style change over time, and therefore is currently is non-compliant with this guide and that we are working to resolve that.

Language Features

edb is written using C++11. We may choose to move on to C++14 some time in the future, but for now, please stick to features that are provided by C++11 only. So long as a feature being used is well supported by both GCC and Clang, unless otherwise noted in the guide, it is acceptable to utilize it.

Qt Version

For now, we support both Qt4 and Qt5, so all code is expected to compile cleanly and function correctly against both Qt4 and Qt5 libraries.

Warnings

The goal is always to compile without warnings when built with -std=c++11 -W -Wall -pedantic.

Portability

Code should be standards compliant and not use compiler extensions (exceptions can be made, but must be wrapped in compiler specific #ifdef blocks.

Namespace using directives

Note: C++11 introduced a syntax for type aliases which make use of the using keyword, this is not talking about those.

Never place a namespace using directive in a header.
Prefer explicit namespace usage such as:

std::string s;

You may utilize a using directive at function scope if it makes the code more readable, and is actually recommended if this aids in ADL. The most common example of this, is with custom swap methods. For example:

class T {
public:
    void swap(T &other) {
        using std::swap;

        swap(x, other.x);
        swap(y, other.y);
    }
private:
    int x;
    B   y;
};

Due to ADL, if B::swap exists, it will be preferred over default std::swap.