- Use Allman style
- Don't use any non-standard-library libraries
- Keep everything in the args namespace
- Keep it simple and fast
- Your changes may be licensed how you wish as long as the project itself can remain MIT-licensed (essentially meaning your license for your changes must be either compatible with the MIT license or you must dual-license and the code put in here must be compatible with the MIT)
- Changes must remain compatible with C++11.
- Do not make defensive changes for conditions that will never happen. Examples:
- Don't check for null pointers for things that can not be null, like argv[i] where i is in the range [0, argc). If the C standard guarantees a shape for argv and arc, we don't need to additionally check those ourselves.
- Don't check for size_t overflow on string arguments. This will never happen.
- For behavior bug fixes, you must add code that will fail on master but succeed with the fix. Do not just test the newly added code.
- For difficult-to-test code, such as undefined behavior fixes or code that leads to corruption that isn't immediately visible, you must include in the description of the PR (or an issue that precedes the PR) a reproduction that shows exactly how to trigger the problem condition.
- Don't add overly-defensive code. The problem condition must have the ability to be practically triggered before we want to worry about it. If the bug would take terabytes of RAM or the heat death of the universe to hit, don't bother fixing it.
- Avoid unnecessary indirection and abstraction.
- Try to avoid growing the code. It's already too big as it is. Unless there's a very good reason (argued for in the PR), PRs should not add a ton of non-test code.