Code Style and Conventions

Programming with a consistent and readable style is an important process skill. It makes it easier for others to read and understand your code and for you to work with other engineers/researchers on projects. All projects have a programming style convention. For example, here is Google’s collection of style guides for various languages.

One of the process skills that I want you to learn in this class is for you to write code that is readable. A portion of each lab grade will be reserved for good style and conventions for code.

We will follow the LLVM style convention. You can read the style guide here. Though some of it is not applicable to the code that we will write in this class, the high-level advice and low-level rules are a good read and might help you think about how to better structure the code that you write.

clang-format

Vim has been set up so that the clang-format tool is run each time you save a C file. This tool automatically formats your files so that they meet the LLVM coding standards.

The files that you turn in must meet this style. If you absolutely need to disable clang-format, you can surround code in blocks that turn off the formatter:

// clang-format off
... // unformatted code
// clang-format on