CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Project Guidelines

Create a global .gitignore

The goal is to exclude the system and IDE directories from the .gitignore of this repository. Please read Ignoring files
If you didn't setup global .gitignore before, here is an example for adding it on your system.
Feel free to create a suitable ignore file from https://www.gitignore.io base on your environment.

Ubuntu or MacOS

git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global
curl https://www.gitignore.io/api/vim,bazel,gradle,android,eclipse,intellij,visualstudio,androidstudio,visualstudiocode -o ~/.gitignore_global

Windows

git config --global core.excludesfile "%USERPROFILE%\.gitignore_global"

curl is not out-of-the-box on Windows, you need to download and put the file into "%USERPROFILE%\.gitignore_global"

Coding Style

The majority of the code in this repository adheres to Google's C++ guidelines. Below are additional rules which we adhere to:

1. C Struct intialisation

If you're initialising a struct, please use member designators to identify the individual fields:

iota_stor_pack_t pack = {.models = (void **)txs,
                         .capacity = 5,
                         .num_loaded = 0,
                         .insufficient_capacity = false};

You can find more information on the capabilities of C99 in this regard here.

2. Put function prototypes inside an extern "C" block

When writing a header file in C, put function prototypes inside an extern "C" block like this:

#ifdef __cplusplus
extern "C" {
#endif

#ifdef __cplusplus
}
#endif

It will avoid having function symbols mangled leading to linkage errors when used in a C++ project. You can find more information about this here.

3. Parameters ordering

• Always put the main component as first parameter.
• If any, always put tangle as second parameter.

retcode_t iota_api_store_transactions(
    iota_api_t const *const api, tangle_t *const tangle,
    store_transactions_req_t const *const req);

retcode_t iota_consensus_ledger_validator_update_snapshot(
    ledger_validator_t const *const lv, tangle_t *const tangle,
    iota_milestone_t *const milestone, bool *const has_snapshot);