Contribute

Thank you for considering contributing to Codon! This page contains some helpful information for getting started. The best place to ask questions or get feedback is our Discord.

Development workflow

All development is done on the develop branch. Just before release, we bump the version number, merge into master and tag the build with a tag of the form vX.Y.Z where X, Y and Z are the SemVer major, minor and patch numbers, respectively. Our CI build process automatically builds and deploys tagged commits as a new GitHub release.

Coding standards

All C++ code should be formatted with ClangFormat using the .clang-format file in the root of the repository.

Writing tests

Tests are written as Codon programs. The test/core/ directory contains some examples. If you add a new test file, be sure to add it to test/main.cpp so that it will be executed as part of the test suite. There are two ways to write tests for Codon:

New style

Example:

@test
def my_test():
    assert 2 + 2 == 4
my_test()

Semantics: assert statements in functions marked @test are not compiled to standard assertions: they don't terminate the program when the condition fails, but instead print source information, fail the test, and move on.

Old style

Example:

print(2 + 2)  # EXPECT: 4

Semantics: The source file is scanned for EXPECTs, executed, then the output is compared to the "expected" output. Note that if you have, for example, an EXPECT in a loop, you will need to duplicate it however many times the loop is executed. Using EXPECT is helpful mainly in cases where you need to test control flow, otherwise prefer the new style.

Pull requests

Pull requests should generally be based on the develop branch. Before submitting a pull request, please make sure...

• ... to provide a clear description of the purpose of the pull request.
• ... to include tests for any new or changed code.
• ... that all code is formatted as per the guidelines above.