Standards, coding styles and guidelines

Purposes of coding standards:

• avoid bugs
• increase portability
• increase readability
• improve security

The end goal is to use C in safety-related systems. Usually this doesn’t cover coding style.

Examples:

• MISRA - automotive
• NASA JPL - mission critical flight
• SEI CERT - secure coding, network devices

Coding style guides cover:

• whitespace: indentation, blank lines, placing braces and spaces
• naming: case, local vs global variables, macros, function-like macros
• long lines, long functions: 80x24
• comment format

Examples:

• Linux kernel

Guidelines are rules plus recommendations. Also covers style.

Examples:

• LLVM Coding standard
• Barr group - embedded
• GNU
• GCC

More:

• awesome-safety-critical
• awesome-coding-standards