Coding Guidelines (MicroBenchmark Reference Manual)

7.3 Coding Guidelines

MicroBenchmark follows to GNU Coding Standards (see GNU Coding Standards) for its source code and build process. The command make indent-code can be used to format the source code the script build-aux/indent-code.sh⁶.

In addition to them, these are some common ideas of the code base:

Function names
Functions with _create on their suffix allocate the object memory, which must be released through the corresponding _release function. Functions with _init and _cleanup work on objects already allocated and must go in pairs too.
Optimization targets
The abstract interfaces (meter, timer) used for the data collection probably need some work for more extended usage.
The self test empty is a good baseline for checking introduced overheads.

On the other hand, optimizations outside the critical path (i.e. test state code paths) are only worth the effort if the readability gets affected.

Footnotes

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indent outputs an undesired format on certain C constructions such as guard macros. The problematic source lines have comments /* *INDENT-ON* */ and /* *INDENT-OFF* */ surrounding them to avoid its modification. Patches for indent-code.sh to instruct indent about these cases are very welcome.