STYLE.LUA(9)

💖 style.lua — the FreeBSD lua file style guide 💖

okay bestie, welcome to style.lua(9), straight out of the Kernel Developer's Manual, section 9. this is THE glow-up guide for how we write lua source files in the FreeBSD source tree, and honestly? it's giving ✨ standards ✨.

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so like, this file spells out the preferred style for lua source files in the FreeBSD source tree. plot twist tho: a lot of the style rules are implicit in the examples. so before you assume style.lua is silent on something, go read the examples first, no cap. 🫶

the copyright header should be a series of single-line comments. and if you've got a multi-line comment, you use the single-line comment style for every single line of it. every one. 💅

after any copyright header, there's a blank line, and then the $FreeBSD$ comment — and this is for non-C/C++ source files specifically.

the preferred method of including other files and modules is with require(name), like this:

-- $FreeBSD: releng/12.2/share/man/man9/style.lua.9 333419 2018-05-09 16:52:28Z kevans $

config = require("config");
menu = require("menu");
password = require("password");
-- One blank line following the module require block

include() is generally avoided. it's giving 🙈 energy, we don't do that here.

indentation and wrapping should match the guidelines provided by style(9). but real talk — it is totally ok to wrap much earlier than 80 columns if readability would otherwise suffer. readability is the main character here. 👑

where possible, s:method(...) is preferred to method(s, ...). this applies to objects with methods, and strings are the classic commonly-used example of objects with methods. iykyk. 🎀

testing for nil should be done explicitly, rather than as a boolean expression. and single-line conditional statements and loops? avoided. periodt.

local variables should be preferred to global variables in module scope. for variable identifiers, internal_underscores tend to be preferred, while camelCase tends to be preferred for function identifiers. two different vibes, two different jobs. ✨

if a table definition spans multiple lines, then the final value in the table should include the optional terminating comma. for example:

-- No terminating comma needed for trivial table definitions
local trivial_table = {1, 2, 3, 4}

local complex_table = {
    {
        id = "foo",
        func = foo_function, -- Trailing comma preferred
    },
    {
        id = "bar",
        func = bar_function,
    },    -- Trailing comma preferred
}

why do we care? because this reduces the chance for errors to be introduced when modifying more complex tables. future you says thank you. 💖

multiple local variables should not be declared and initialized on a single line. but!! lines containing multiple variable declarations without initialization are ok. and lines containing multiple variable declarations initialized to a single function call that returns a tuple with the same number of values is also ok. balance, bestie. ⚖️

initialization should be done at declaration time, as appropriate. 🦋

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• style(9)

📜 HISTORY 📜

this manual page is inspired from the same source as the style(9) manual page in FreeBSD. iconic lineage honestly. 👑

and that's the whole vibe check, babe — this page came to you from <strong>Debian</strong>, dated <strong>February 25, 2018</strong>. go forth and write the prettiest lua in the whole tree 💅💖✨