Coding Guidelines

• All development
  • Use sentence case, without capital letters in the middle of sentences unless specifically required.
  • Comments should be limited to the following, unless there's a specific reason otherwise. Overuse of comments is discouraged.
    • A brief description at the top of files.
    • A copyright notice at the top of files.
    • A brief description of each 'paragraph' in long functions.
    • An explanation any section of code that may be counter-intuitive to someone reading the source.

• Go specific
  • Always use "go fmt".
  • Always strip executables before distribution.

• Perl specific
  • Use tabs instead of spaces for indentation.
  • Leave a space after negation: if ( ! $variable ) {
  • Leave a space after open bracket: if ( $variable ) {
  • Leave a space before close bracket: if ( $variable ) {
  • Do not leave a blank line after if, while, foreach, else, etc.
  • Do not leave a blank line before closing curly brackets of blocks.
  • Do not leave multiple consecutive blank lines.
  • If a list is very long, it should be spread across multiple lines. The last line before the closing round bracket should have a trailing comma.
  • Built-in Perl functions which can optionally have brackets, such as scalar(), should normally have brackets: scalar( @variable )
  • 'use' statements should be listed at the top of each file, in case-insensitive alphabetical order, unless otherwise necessary.
  • 'require' statements may be embedded within functions.
  • Hash references are normally given very short names, typically one letter, or two if necessary to be unambiguous.
  • Enumerated hash arrays should use " => " between keys and values, and ", " between values and keys.
  • Use of the Perl "<condition> ? <if true> : <if false>" construct is encouraged where thought appropriate.
  • Perl libraries should normally use @EXPORT_OK rather than @EXPORT.
  • Libraries should where possible name their functions starting with <library>_.