Developer Notes

Style guide

Automated source code formatting is performed using clang-format. Run:

./scripts/format_source

in the repository root directory to automatically use clang-format to format C++ source as well as JuliaFormatter.jl for Julia and Markdown files. The script can be viewed in the repository.

The following conventions also apply:

• PascalCase for classes and function names.
• Follow 'include what you use' (IWYU), with the include order dictated by the Google C++ Style Guide. This order should be automatically enforced by the clang-format style file.
• Code comments should be full sentences, with punctuation. At this time, no Doxygen API reference is generated and so comments generally do not need to conform to Doxygen syntax.

Static analysis

During the cmake configuration step, definining the variables ANALYZE_SOURCES_CLANG_TIDY and ANALYZE_SOURCES_CPPCHECK to ON will turn on static analysis using clang-tidy and cppcheck, respectively, during the build step. This requires the executables to be installed and findable by CMake on your system.

JSON Schema for configuration files

A JSON format configuration file, for example named config.json, can be validated against the provided Schema using:

./scripts/validate_config config.json

This script uses Julia's JSONSchema.jl and the Schema provided in scripts/schema/ to parse the configuration file and check that the fields are correctly specified. This script and the associated Schema are also installed and can be accessed in <INSTALL_DIR>/bin.

Changelog

Code contributions should generally be accompanied by an entry in the changelog.