Tabs are 8 characters, and thus indentations are also 8 characters. There are heretic movements that try to make indentations 4 (or even 2!) characters deep, and that is akin to trying to define the value of PI to be 3.

I am in love with this awsome document; I love its guidelines, and coding conventions.

However, when Rust was introduced into the kernel, they butchered these beautiful guidelines, I know it’s hard to look at such heretic actions, but you have to see this:

The default settings of rustfmt are used. This means the idiomatic Rust style is followed. For instance, 4 spaces are used for indentation rather than tabs.

How can this even relate to the ideology of the first document? I am deeply saddened by these new rules.

I know this is “The Rust experiment”, but this must be fixed before it’s too late! This has to reach someone.

A counter-argument might be:

The code should be formatted using rustfmt. In this way, a person contributing from time to time to the kernel does not need to learn and remember one more style guide. More importantly, reviewers and maintainers do not need to spend time pointing out style issues anymore, and thus less patch roundtrips may be needed to land a change.

And to that I say that rustfmt is configurable per project, and if it isn’t, then it has to be. Doesn’t something like .editorconfig exist?

  • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
    0·
    7 months ago

    8 space-long, hard tabs.

    Hard disagree. 8 spaces is waste and 4 should be industry standard. Tabs should not be used for indentation, but spaces. On the other side, Tabs are configurable, so that’s actually a plus point.

    80 character limit instead of 100.

    Why? 80 is an old standard with limitations that do not apply today anymore. We have wider screens and higher resolutions. While it makes sense to keep this to be consistent with previous code and language defaults for C, there is no reason to enforce this for the new adopted language, which already has a standard on its own.

    And yes rustfmt can be configured and when I started with Rust I changed max_width to 80, just because I was used to it with Python. But there is no benefit doing this in Rust.