Guidelines for code formatting

The following list provides the general formatting/indentation rules for GROMACS code (C/C++):

  • Basic indentation is four spaces.
  • Keep lines at a reasonable length. There is no hard limit, but use 80 characters as a guideline. If you end up indenting very deeply, consider splitting the code into functions.
  • Do not use tabs, only spaces. Most editors can be configured to generate spaces even when pressing tab. Tabs (in particular when mixed with spaces) easily break indentation in contexts where settings are not exactly equal (e.g., in git diff output).
  • No trailing whitespace.
  • Use braces always for delimiting blocks, even when there is only a single statement in an if block or similar.
  • Put braces on their own lines. The only exception is short one-line inline functions in C++ classes, which can be put on a single line.
  • Use spaces liberally.
  • extern "C" and namespace blocks are not indented, but all others (including class and switch bodies) are.

Additionally:

  • All source files and other non-trivial scripts should contain a copyright header with a predetermined format and license information (check existing files). Copyright holder should be “the GROMACS development team” for the years where the code has been in the GROMACS source repository, but earlier years can hold other copyrights.
  • Whenever you update a file, you should check that the current year is listed as a copyright year.

Most of the above guidelines are enforced using uncrustify, an automatic source code formatting tool. The copyright guidelines are enforced by a separate Python script. See Automatic source code formatting for details. Note that due to the nature of uncrustify (it only does all-or-nothing formatting), it enforces several additional formatting rules in addition to those above.

Enforcing a consistent formatting has a few advantages:

  • No one needs to manually review code for most of these formatting issues, and people can focus on content.
  • A separate automatic script (see below) can be applied to re-establish the formatting after refactoring like renaming symbols or changing some parameters, without needing to manually do it all.