Coding Style¶

Mesa is over 20 years old and the coding style has evolved over time. Some old parts use a style that’s a bit out of date. Different sections of mesa can use different coding style as set in the local EditorConfig (.editorconfig) and/or Emacs (.dir-locals.el) file. Alternatively the following is applicable. If the guidelines below don’t cover something, try following the format of existing, neighboring code.

Basic formatting guidelines

3-space indentation, no tabs.
Limit lines to 78 or fewer characters. The idea is to prevent line wrapping in 80-column editors and terminals. There are exceptions, such as if you’re defining a large, static table of information.
Opening braces go on the same line as the if/for/while statement. For example:
```
if (condition) {
   foo;
} else {
   bar;
}
```
Put a space before/after operators. For example, a = b + c; and not a=b+c;
This GNU indent command generally does the right thing for formatting:
```
indent -br -i3 -npcs --no-tabs infile.c -o outfile.c
```

Use comments wherever you think it would be helpful for other developers. Several specific cases and style examples follow. Note that we roughly follow Doxygen conventions.

Single-line comments:

/* null-out pointer to prevent dangling reference below */
bufferObj = NULL;

Or,

bufferObj = NULL;  /* prevent dangling reference below */

Multi-line comment:

/* If this is a new buffer object id, or one which was generated but
 * never used before, allocate a buffer object now.
 */

We try to quote the OpenGL specification where prudent:

/* Page 38 of the PDF of the OpenGL ES 3.0 spec says:
 *
 *     "An INVALID_OPERATION error is generated for any of the following
 *     conditions:
 *
 *     * <length> is zero."
 *
 * Additionally, page 94 of the PDF of the OpenGL 4.5 core spec
 * (30.10.2014) also says this, so it's no longer allowed for desktop GL,
 * either.
 */

Function comment example:

/**
 * Create and initialize a new buffer object.  Called via the
 * ctx->Driver.CreateObject() driver callback function.
 * \param  name  integer name of the object
 * \param  type  one of GL_FOO, GL_BAR, etc.
 * \return  pointer to new object or NULL if error
 */
struct gl_object *
_mesa_create_object(GLuint name, GLenum type)
{
   /* function body */
}

Put the function return type and qualifiers on one line and the function name and parameters on the next, as seen above. This makes it easy to use grep ^function_name dir/* to find function definitions. Also, the opening brace goes on the next line by itself (see above.)

Function names follow various conventions depending on the type of function:

Convention	Explanation
`glFooBar()`	a public GL entry point (in `glapi_dispatch.c`)
`_mesa_FooBar()`	the internal immediate mode function
`save_FooBar()`	retained mode (display list) function in `dlist.c`
`foo_bar()`	a static (private) function
`_mesa_foo_bar()`	an internal non-static Mesa function

Constants, macros and enum names are ALL_UPPERCASE, with _ between words.
Mesa usually uses camel case for local variables (Ex: localVarname) while Gallium typically uses underscores (Ex: local_var_name).
Global variables are almost never used because Mesa should be thread-safe.
Booleans. Places that are not directly visible to the GL API should prefer the use of bool, true, and false over GLboolean, GL_TRUE, and GL_FALSE. In C code, this may mean that #include <stdbool.h> needs to be added. The try_emit_* method src/mesa/state_tracker/st_glsl_to_tgsi.cpp can serve as an example.