Style Guidelines

Hello and thank you for contributing to Processing! We are thrilled to have you join. This style guide is designed to help us all write code that is clear and consistent across the entire project. By following these guidelines, you will help improve our code's readability and make it easier for all of us to collaborate on the code.

This document started as a personal collection of notes and will evolve over time into a clearer and more comprehensive guide.

Indentation

Always spaces, two of them. Never tabs.

Spacing

• Always a space after if. Use if (blah) not if(blah). Example if/else block:

    if (blah) {
      // yes like this
    } else {
      // something besides
    }

• No single line if blocks

if (this) something
else blah blah blah

instead use

if (this) {
  // something 
} else {
  // blah blah blah
}

• No spaces inside parens.

if( blah )  // BAD
if ( blah ){  // BADDER
if (blah) {  // good

• Use a space after the paren and before the curly brace:

if (blah) {

not

if (blah){

• An empty block should be { } not {} or

if (emptyBlock) {
}

...unless there's a // comment to be made inside the empty block:

if (emptyBlock) {
  // a useful comment here about why this case is skipped
}

• Use spaces before/after commas:

• someFunction(apple,bear,cat); //bad

• someFunction(apple, bear, cat); // correct

• Use spaces before/after use of +

• String s = "this is an " + "excessive use " + "of quotes to demonstrate concatenation.";

• String s = "this is the "+adjective+" wrong way "+exclamation+" and is tough to read";

• Spaces before/after operators in nearly all cases:

  • if (a == b) not if (a==b)
  • for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {

• ...with an exception for cases where it helps clarify order of operations:

  • int a = 13 + b*12 + c*7 + d is ok to keep the * adjacent for easier reading

Brace yourself

Always use braces:

for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
  println(i);
}

never this:

for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) 
  println(i);

Not using braces is too prone to causing subtle errors when merging code from multiple people.

The rare exception is the occasional ‘continue’ statement at the top of a for-loop, or sometimes a single line if (somethingOrOther) return; if it just doesn't make sense to have a lot of extras.

Starting brace goes on same line, end brace goes on its own. An else statement should look like } else {

Blank lines

Use two blank lines between function blocks.

One blank line after the package declaration.

Two blank lines between the imports and the class definition.

No blank line after the function definition or before the closing brace.

Fiddly things

• Use String[] lines instead of String lines[]

• Use if (blah == null) instead of if (null == blah). It reads better to most people. Putting null on the left is good practice in C, C++, and perhaps other languages, but the error that it avoids is impossible in Java anyway. And if you want to be really pedantic, the compiler may even produce less efficient code with if (null == because if_acmpne is used, which requires two variables, instead of ifnonnull.

• Only use the ? operator if it saves multiple lines of code. One probably use is a short function that returns a result immediately, i.e. return (something == null) ? 0 : Integer.parseInt(something)

• Place || && etc on the end, not the start, of the line. This keeps variables lined up with one another. (This is different from Oracle style)

• static goes first (before public et al) (This is different from Oracle style)

Functions

When adding parameters to a function, add to the end. Don't change order, even if it feels more intuitive for that variation. Only increase the number, don't have alternate forms with the same basic number of arguments.

Comments

• Always one space after the // in single line comments

• Two spaces before // at the end of a line (that has code as well)

• Try to use // comments inside functions, to make it easier to remove a whole block via /* */

• When making a fix related to an issue on Github, include the URL to the issue. Don't just put #3257 or something like that, use the URL. We can spare the extra characters: the extra letters won't make the PDE run slower, but will make it easier for someone returning to the code to look up the issue.

New lines

• Keep code under 80 columns. Break up statements if you must.

  • There are some exceptions (the PreferencesFrame class, for instance) where breaking things up is even uglier, so the 80 column limit is occasionally ignored.

• Avoid the chaining madness that has afflicted Java programming of late, where dots are placed at the end (or even beginning) of multi-line indented poetry.

Layout

When I was a young developer, I did crap like this too. Don't be like me:

   if (parent ==null) return fromAngle((float)(Math.random()*Math.PI*2),target);
   else               return fromAngle(parent.random(PConstants.TWO_PI),target);

(Point being, don't get cute with adding extra space to indentation for symmetry that you like personally. This is really subjective territory, and should just be avoided.)

Don’t stack up declarations and definitions:

public static final int STATUS_EMPTY = 100, STATUS_COMPILER_ERR = 200, STATUS_WARNING = 300, STATUS_INFO = 400, STATUS_ERR = 500;

Because someday, we're gonna remove STATUS_INFO and that'll make it tougher to see the change. Just write them out:

static final int STATUS_EMPTY = 100;
static final int STATUS_COMPILER_ERR = 200;
...etc

If importing many items inside a single package, consider using * instead of listing out a dozen individual classes.

Please do not expand the imports in source that you’re editing.

Where possible, make sure text files checked into the repo are text files, and are marked as such so they can use the correct encoding for the platform. Right now, we’re not doing this consistently in the repo, but please use this convention for newer files (or help us fix the others).

Copyrights and Attribution

• Copyright will be assigned to The Processing Foundation. This is our non-profit entity that supports the work. If you don't want to assign copyright, you cannot contribute. If you cannot assign copyright (meaning that it's not your code, it's another license, etc), then do not contribute.

• Skip the bylines on source. Your code will be reworked so much by the time it's actually used that it just doesn't make sense. The commit history will tell a more accurate story anyway.

Philosophical

• Inner classes don’t reach in and reference inner classes from classes not in the same file.

• GUI code As much as possible, GUI code should not live inside processing.app.Base. we rely on processing.app.Toolkit for that. This keeps the command line versions behaving better.

• Ordering if blocks Where possible make the default case the first part of the ‘if’ block. this can’t be done slavishly because it can make things awkward, but it’s generally a useful idea.

• Already commented code There are many commented-out sections of code. Moreso than is actually a good idea. Usually they’re the result of trying many different things before getting to a final/working solution. It also sometimes prevents me from going back and making the same mistake again. This is, of course, bad practice: The former should be fixed with documentation, the latter fixed by heavier reliance on the version control system. However, since one developer is doing the vast majority of the work, I don’t win style points by cleaning up code for people who want to peruse it—and it takes time away if I have to come back and finish debugging a feature (I'm a bit feeble-minded that way). Because development is sporadic, I often have to set something down before it's finished, so I keep the alternate bits around. Also, it's often the case that one version of the code works on one platform (or version of Java) and not another. These go in and out of testing as I move around between platforms.