Coding Style Guides

For the vast majority of the codebase, collaborators should adhere to Google's style guides, but all project-specific style and details not listed in Google's guides should be listed here. Please edit this document and add additional sections as necessary.

iOS / Objective-C

Read Google's Objective-C Style Guide first.

• Constants should be declared as static const variables instead of #define macros. This allows the compiler to check for type safety and safeguards against poorly-named macros. Adhere to the Objective-C naming convention for constants used by Apple in order to maintain consistency with constants in our codebase and Apple's system libraries. Example:

    static const int kNilOptions = 0; // Good
    static const int NIL_OPTIONS = 0; // Not good
    #define NIL_OPTIONS 0             // Bad
  

• Internal private properties should be used instead of internal private instance variables. This allows for finer-grained control of autosynthesized variables through synthesized accessor methods, which should be overwritten as necessary. In the implementation of a class, self.property should be used in all places instead of _property except in initialization methods. Protocol conformations should also be declared publically.

• Properties accessors should be called via dot syntax whenever convenient. This allows the compiler to throw errors if a property is not found and reduces verbosity. Shorter statements are especially important to adhere to the 80-character line limit.

    cell.textField.text = @"sample text";      // Good
    [[cell textField] setText:@"sample text"]; // Bad, less readable