D Style document

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, March 8, 2025 8:34:03 AM MST Dejan Lekic via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> Thanks Paul! So do you think people who are working on libraries,
> ie. code that is supposed to be used by a wider D developer
> audience, should follow the D Style document?

The style guide is largely broken into two parts - the rules about how to
name symbols, and the additional formatting rules for contributing to
official projects such as Phobos or druntime.

The naming rules are rules that every public library should be following if
the developers working on it want to fit into the D ecosystem, and some
programmers will complain if a library does not follow the official naming
guidelines (whereas some other progammers won't care much). Ideally,
everyone would be following the naming guidelines in the style guide, but
some people prefer not to for a variety of reasons. And of course, when
you're dealing with bindings to other languages, you can't always follow the
D naming conventions.

On the other hand, the formatting rules in the guide are almost entirely
aimed at contributions to official D source code, and there's no reason to
follow those if you don't want to (outside of contributions to official D
source code). It has no impact on users of a library, and it really only
matters to folks contributing to it. So, whatever formatting rules you
follow when writing a library should be based on what the contributors to
that library want to do.

There is a bit about general whitespace stuff at the top of the style guide
which is not specific to official D sources (e.g. using 4 spaces for
indentation and not using tabs), and prior to the Phobos style guide stuff
added later on, it was all that the style guide said about formatting. So,
maybe it should be moved to the Phobos section, but it does provide a nice
default for those who don't feel strongly about it. Ultimately though, it
doesn't matter to the users of a library, whereas the naming conventions
directly impact those users.

Of course, for projects that are not made public libraries, even the naming
rules arguably don't need to be followed, though it's arguably a good habit
to get into.

- Jonathan M Davis