CodingStyle
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上传日期:2013-02-24
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- Linux kernel coding style
- This is a short document describing the preferred coding style for the
- linux kernel. Coding style is very personal, and I won't _force_ my
- views on anybody, but this is what goes for anything that I have to be
- able to maintain, and I'd prefer it for most other things too. Please
- at least consider the points made here.
- First off, I'd suggest printing out a copy of the GNU coding standards,
- and NOT read it. Burn them, it's a great symbolic gesture.
- Anyway, here goes:
- Chapter 1: Indentation
- Tabs are 8 characters, and thus indentations are also 8 characters.
- There are heretic movements that try to make indentations 4 (or even 2!)
- characters deep, and that is akin to trying to define the value of PI to
- be 3.
- Rationale: The whole idea behind indentation is to clearly define where
- a block of control starts and ends. Especially when you've been looking
- at your screen for 20 straight hours, you'll find it a lot easier to see
- how the indentation works if you have large indentations.
- Now, some people will claim that having 8-character indentations makes
- the code move too far to the right, and makes it hard to read on a
- 80-character terminal screen. The answer to that is that if you need
- more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix
- your program.
- In short, 8-char indents make things easier to read, and have the added
- benefit of warning you when you're nesting your functions too deep.
- Heed that warning.
- Chapter 2: Placing Braces
- The other issue that always comes up in C styling is the placement of
- braces. Unlike the indent size, there are few technical reasons to
- choose one placement strategy over the other, but the preferred way, as
- shown to us by the prophets Kernighan and Ritchie, is to put the opening
- brace last on the line, and put the closing brace first, thusly:
- if (x is true) {
- we do y
- }
- However, there is one special case, namely functions: they have the
- opening brace at the beginning of the next line, thus:
- int function(int x)
- {
- body of function
- }
- Heretic people all over the world have claimed that this inconsistency
- is ... well ... inconsistent, but all right-thinking people know that
- (a) K&R are _right_ and (b) K&R are right. Besides, functions are
- special anyway (you can't nest them in C).
- Note that the closing brace is empty on a line of its own, _except_ in
- the cases where it is followed by a continuation of the same statement,
- ie a "while" in a do-statement or an "else" in an if-statement, like
- this:
- do {
- body of do-loop
- } while (condition);
- and
- if (x == y) {
- ..
- } else if (x > y) {
- ...
- } else {
- ....
- }
-
- Rationale: K&R.
- Also, note that this brace-placement also minimizes the number of empty
- (or almost empty) lines, without any loss of readability. Thus, as the
- supply of new-lines on your screen is not a renewable resource (think
- 25-line terminal screens here), you have more empty lines to put
- comments on.
- Chapter 3: Naming
- C is a Spartan language, and so should your naming be. Unlike Modula-2
- and Pascal programmers, C programmers do not use cute names like
- ThisVariableIsATemporaryCounter. A C programmer would call that
- variable "tmp", which is much easier to write, and not the least more
- difficult to understand.
- HOWEVER, while mixed-case names are frowned upon, descriptive names for
- global variables are a must. To call a global function "foo" is a
- shooting offense.
- GLOBAL variables (to be used only if you _really_ need them) need to
- have descriptive names, as do global functions. If you have a function
- that counts the number of active users, you should call that
- "count_active_users()" or similar, you should _not_ call it "cntusr()".
- Encoding the type of a function into the name (so-called Hungarian
- notation) is brain damaged - the compiler knows the types anyway and can
- check those, and it only confuses the programmer. No wonder MicroSoft
- makes buggy programs.
- LOCAL variable names should be short, and to the point. If you have
- some random integer loop counter, it should probably be called "i".
- Calling it "loop_counter" is non-productive, if there is no chance of it
- being mis-understood. Similarly, "tmp" can be just about any type of
- variable that is used to hold a temporary value.
- If you are afraid to mix up your local variable names, you have another
- problem, which is called the function-growth-hormone-imbalance syndrome.
- See next chapter.
-
- Chapter 4: Functions
- Functions should be short and sweet, and do just one thing. They should
- fit on one or two screenfuls of text (the ISO/ANSI screen size is 80x24,
- as we all know), and do one thing and do that well.
- The maximum length of a function is inversely proportional to the
- complexity and indentation level of that function. So, if you have a
- conceptually simple function that is just one long (but simple)
- case-statement, where you have to do lots of small things for a lot of
- different cases, it's OK to have a longer function.
- However, if you have a complex function, and you suspect that a
- less-than-gifted first-year high-school student might not even
- understand what the function is all about, you should adhere to the
- maximum limits all the more closely. Use helper functions with
- descriptive names (you can ask the compiler to in-line them if you think
- it's performance-critical, and it will probably do a better job of it
- that you would have done).
- Another measure of the function is the number of local variables. They
- shouldn't exceed 5-10, or you're doing something wrong. Re-think the
- function, and split it into smaller pieces. A human brain can
- generally easily keep track of about 7 different things, anything more
- and it gets confused. You know you're brilliant, but maybe you'd like
- to understand what you did 2 weeks from now.
- Chapter 5: Commenting
- Comments are good, but there is also a danger of over-commenting. NEVER
- try to explain HOW your code works in a comment: it's much better to
- write the code so that the _working_ is obvious, and it's a waste of
- time to explain badly written code.
- Generally, you want your comments to tell WHAT your code does, not HOW.
- Also, try to avoid putting comments inside a function body: if the
- function is so complex that you need to separately comment parts of it,
- you should probably go back to chapter 4 for a while. You can make
- small comments to note or warn about something particularly clever (or
- ugly), but try to avoid excess. Instead, put the comments at the head
- of the function, telling people what it does, and possibly WHY it does
- it.
- Chapter 6: You've made a mess of it
- That's OK, we all do. You've probably been told by your long-time Unix
- user helper that "GNU emacs" automatically formats the C sources for
- you, and you've noticed that yes, it does do that, but the defaults it
- uses are less than desirable (in fact, they are worse than random
- typing - a infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never
- make a good program).
- So, you can either get rid of GNU emacs, or change it to use saner
- values. To do the latter, you can stick the following in your .emacs file:
- (defun linux-c-mode ()
- "C mode with adjusted defaults for use with the Linux kernel."
- (interactive)
- (c-mode)
- (c-set-style "K&R")
- (setq c-basic-offset 8))
- This will define the M-x linux-c-mode command. When hacking on a
- module, if you put the string -*- linux-c -*- somewhere on the first
- two lines, this mode will be automatically invoked. Also, you may want
- to add
- (setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("/usr/src/linux.*/.*\.[ch]$" . linux-c-mode)
- auto-mode-alist))
- to your .emacs file if you want to have linux-c-mode switched on
- automagically when you edit source files under /usr/src/linux.
- But even if you fail in getting emacs to do sane formatting, not
- everything is lost: use "indent".
- Now, again, GNU indent has the same brain dead settings that GNU emacs
- has, which is why you need to give it a few command line options.
- However, that's not too bad, because even the makers of GNU indent
- recognize the authority of K&R (the GNU people aren't evil, they are
- just severely misguided in this matter), so you just give indent the
- options "-kr -i8" (stands for "K&R, 8 character indents").
- "indent" has a lot of options, and especially when it comes to comment
- re-formatting you may want to take a look at the manual page. But
- remember: "indent" is not a fix for bad programming.
- Chapter 7: Configuration-files
- For configuration options (arch/xxx/config.in, and all the Config.in files),
- somewhat different indentation is used.
- An indention level of 3 is used in the code, while the text in the config-
- options should have an indention-level of 2 to indicate dependencies. The
- latter only applies to bool/tristate options. For other options, just use
- common sense. An example:
- if [ "$CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL" = "y" ]; then
- tristate 'Apply nitroglycerine inside the keyboard (DANGEROUS)' CONFIG_BOOM
- if [ "$CONFIG_BOOM" != "n" ]; then
- bool ' Output nice messages when you explode' CONFIG_CHEER
- fi
- fi
- Generally, CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL should surround all options not considered
- stable. All options that are known to trash data (experimental write-
- support for file-systems, for instance) should be denoted (DANGEROUS), other
- Experimental options should be denoted (EXPERIMENTAL).
- Chapter 8: Data structures
- Data structures that have visibility outside the single-threaded
- environment they are created and destroyed in should always have
- reference counts. In the kernel, garbage collection doesn't exist (and
- outside the kernel garbage collection is slow and inefficient), which
- means that you absolutely _have_ to reference count all your uses.
- Reference counting means that you can avoid locking, and allows multiple
- users to have access to the data structure in parallel - and not having
- to worry about the structure suddenly going away from under them just
- because they slept or did something else for a while.
- Note that locking is _not_ a replacement for reference counting.
- Locking is used to keep data structures coherent, while reference
- counting is a memory management technique. Usually both are needed, and
- they are not to be confused with each other.
- Many data structures can indeed have two levels of reference counting,
- when there are users of different "classes". The subclass count counts
- the number of subclass users, and decrements the global count just once
- when the subclass count goes to zero.
- Examples of this kind of "multi-reference-counting" can be found in
- memory management ("struct mm_struct": mm_users and mm_count), and in
- filesystem code ("struct super_block": s_count and s_active).
- Remember: if another thread can find your data structure, and you don't
- have a reference count on it, you almost certainly have a bug.