Re: [Lib2geom-devel] Getting Started

[MenTaLguY <me...@ry...>]

On Mon, 16 Apr 2007 12:24:17 -0700, "Sunburned Surveyor" <sun...@gm...> wrote:
> [1] Should I be using the Inkscape codeing standards for my work on
> lib2geom?

Yes.  The one difference is that we have often been putting the underscore on the end of private/protected symbols rather than the beginning.  I don't think people care too much either way, and at this point there's actually quite a bit of style cleanup which will eventually have to be done regardless.

> [2] I was going to use Anjuta as my IDE. Are there any comments on this?

I've no particular experience with Anjuta or how it would integrate with cmake.  At worst, you can use it as a glorified text editor.

> [3] I can now see that a "pointer" and a "reference" are two totally
> different things in C++, although they have there similarities. Which
> should
> I use when creating a reference to an object? It seems like pointers are
> more powerful...

References are not very useful aside from avoiding copies for passing function arguments -- and very occasionally return values (_if_ you can guarantee the lifetime of the object you're returning a reference to appropriately).

As for pointers, I think the general consensus is that explicit use of pointers should be avoided when possible.  For the moment, we try to pass things around by value (or reference, in the cases where that is appropriate).

> [4] Is there a standard set of classes that I can use in lib2geom for
> things like strings and object collections?

Yes.  The C++ standard library provides a number of things like IO, string and exception classes, and collections are provided by STL -- see http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl for documentation of the latter.

note: lib2geom should not really need to do very much IO or string manipulation.

-mental