Coding Conventions

At A Glance

We're trying to be compliant to the FreeBSD coding style. However, we have some rules that differ. In addition to that, we use the CERT Secure Coding Standard.

• CERT Secure Coding Style
• FreeBSD Coding Style

Details

Layout

• two spaces indentation
• 80 Characters per line
• Only use multi line comments like /* foo */. Please do not use //.

Pointer

• use char *foo instead of char * foo or char* foo

Strings

• Use the string typedef in sb-common.h instead of char * if yout want to use strings. We introduced this structure, because C strings do not carry information about their length. We think, this is error prone. To convert a char * into a string, use can the helper functions cstring_to_string or cstring_copy_string.

Functions

• We use the following style for function definitions (differs from the FreeBSD style). Here, the return value is on the same line like the rest. This makes the code better grep-able.

having the return value in the same line makes it grep-able:

int foo (int x)
{
  /* Some code */
}

Function Return Values and Exit Codes

• a function should return a return code indicating whether the execution succeeded. Usually they return an int. A return (0) indicates success while a negative number indicates an error.
• every return value, must be verified
• explicit checks preferred since they make it easier to understand the code.

explicitly checking a function's return value is good practice:

if (foobar() != 0 ) { 
 /* error handling */
 ...
}