Working with Our Code

BRL-CAD consists of more than 1 million lines of source code spanning more than 20 foundation libraries and 400 application modules.

The majority of BRL-CAD is written in highly portable C and C++, with some GUI and scripting components written in Tcl/Tk¹. There is also some support for, and bindings to, other languages available. POSIX² shell scripts are used for deployment integration testing. BRL-CAD uses the CMake³ build system for compilation and unit testing.

The Big Picture

The source code and most project data are stored in a Subversion⁴ version control system for change tracking and collaborative development. Trunk development is generally stable, but cross-platform compilation is not guaranteed. A separate branch (named STABLE) provides a higher level of quality assurance. Every released version of BRL-CAD is tested and tagged.

The project aims for an It Just Works approach to compilation whereby a functional build of BRL-CAD is possible without needing to install more than a compiler, CMake, and a build environment--for example, GNU Make or Microsoft Visual Studio. BRL-CAD provides all of the necessary third-party dependencies for download and compilation convenience within source distributions but by default will build using system versions of those dependencies if available.

As with any large system that has been under development for a number of years, there are vast sections of code that may be unfamiliar, uninteresting, or even daunting. Don't panic. BRL-CAD has been intentionally designed with layering and modularity in mind.

You can generally focus in on the enhancement or change that interests you without being too concerned with other portions of the code. You should, however, do some basic research to make sure what you plan to contribute isn't already in the BRL-CAD code base.

History of the Code

As mentioned previously, the initial architecture and design of BRL-CAD began in 1979. Development as a unified package began in 1983. The first public release was in 1984. And on December 21, 2004, BRL-CAD became an open source project⁵.

BRL-CAD is a mature code base that has remained active over decades due to continual attention on design and maintainability. Since the project's inception, more than 200 people have directly contributed to BRL-CAD. The project has historically received support from numerous organizations within academia, commercial industry, various government agencies, and from various independent contributors. We credit all contributors in BRL-CAD's authorship documentation⁶.

The following diagram illustrates how the number of lines of code in BRL-CAD has changed over time: 

System Architecture

BRL-CAD is designed based on a UNIX⁷ methodology of the command-line services, providing many tools that work in harmony to complete a specific task. These tools include geometry and image converters, signal and image processing tools, various raytrace applications, geometry manipulators, and much more.

To support what has grown into a relatively large software system, BRL-CAD takes advantage of a variety of support libraries that encapsulate and simplify application development. At the heart of BRL-CAD is a multi-representation ray tracing library named LIBRT. BRL-CAD specifies its own file format (files with the extension .g or .asc) for storing information on disk. The ray tracing library uses a suite of other libraries for other basic application functionality.

Tenets of Good Software

BRL-CAD's architecture is designed to be as cross-platform and portable as is realistically and reasonably possible. As such, BRL-CAD maintains support for many legacy systems and devices provided that maintaining such support is not a significant burden on new development. 

The code adheres to a published change deprecation and obsolescence policy⁸ whereby features that have been made publicly available are not removed without appropriate notification. Generally there should be a compelling motivation to remove any existing functionality, but improvements are encouraged.

BRL-CAD has a longstanding heritage of maintaining verifiable, validated, and repeatable results in critical portions of the package, particularly in the ray tracing library. BRL-CAD includes regression tests that will compare runtime behavior against known results and report any deviations from previous results as failures. Considerable attention is put into verification and validation throughout BRL-CAD. Incorrect behavior does not need to be preserved simply to maintain consistency, but it is rare to find genuine errors in the baseline testing results. So, anyone proposing such a behavior change will have to conclusively demonstrate that the previous result is incorrect.

Code Layout

The basic layout of BRL-CAD's source code places public API headers in the top-level include directory and source code for both applications and libraries in the src directory. The following is a partial listing of how the code is organized in a checkout or source distribution. Note that some subdirectories contain a README file with more details on the content in that directory.

Applications & Resources

db/

doc/

doc/docbook

include/

regress/

src/

src/conv/

src/fb/

src/mged/

src/other/

src/proc-db/

src/rt*/

src/util/

Libraries

src/libbn/

src/libbu

src/libgcv/

src/libged/

src/libicv/

src/libpkg/

src/librt/

src/libwdb/

src/lib*/tests/

BRL-CAD has a STABLE branch in SVN that should always compile and run on all supported platforms. The primary development branch trunk, unlike STABLE, is generally expected to compile but may occasionally fail to do so during active development.

Languages

The majority of BRL-CAD is written in ANSI/POSIX C with the intent of strictly conforming with the C standard. The core libraries are all C API, though several--such as the LIBBU and LIBRT libraries--use C++ for implementation details. Our C libraries can use C++ for implementation detail, but they cannot expose C++ in the public API.

Major components of the system are written in the following languages: 

• STEP and NURBS boundary representation support: C++
• The MGED geometry editor: a combination of C, Tcl/Tk, and Incr Tcl/Tk
• The BRL-CAD Benchmark, build system, and utility scripts: POSIX-compliant Bourne Shell Script
• Initial implementation of a BRL-CAD Geometry Server: PHP

Source code files use the following extensions:

• C files: .c
• Header files: .h
• C++ files: .cpp
• PHP files: .php
• Tcl/Tk files: .tcl or .tk
• POSIX Bourne-style shell scripts: .sh
• Perl files: .pl (program) or .pm (module) 

With release 7.0, BRL-CAD has moved forward and worked toward making all of the software's C code conform strictly with the ANSI/ISO standard for C language compilation (ISO/IEC 9899:1990, or c89). Support for older compilers and older K&R-based system facilities is being migrated to build system declarations or preprocessor defines, or is being removed outright. You can, however, make modifications that assume compiler conformance with the ANSI C standard (c89).

Coding Style

To ensure consistency, the coherence of the project, and the long-term maintainability of BRL-CAD, we use a defined coding style and conventions that contributors are expected to follow. Our coding style is documented in the HACKING file of any source distribution.

Our style may not be your preferred style. While we welcome discussion, we will always prefer consistency over any personal preference. Contributions that do not follow our style will generally be rejected until they do.

Here are some highlights of our style:

• Global variables, structures, classes, and other public data containers are discouraged within application code. Do not add any new global variables to existing libraries. Global variables are often a quick solution to some deeper coding problem. However, they carry significant maintenance costs, introduce complexity to the code, make multi-threading support more costly, pollute the public API (symbol-wise at a minimum), increase security risks, are error-prone to use, and usually complicate future efforts to refactor and restructure the code. Using static variables (whether function- or static/file-scoped) is a viable alternative. Restructuring the logic to not be stateful is even better.
• Exact floating point comparisons are unreliable without requiring IEEE-compliant floating point math, but BRL-CAD does not require such math for portability and for performance reasons. When floating point comparisons are necessary, use the NEAR_EQUAL and NEAR_ZERO macros with a specified tolerance or the EQUAL and ZERO macros where a tolerance is indeterminate. All the macros are available by including bn.h, part of libbn.
• The code should strive to achieve conformance with the GNU coding standard with a few exceptions. One such exception is not using the GNU indentation style, but instead using the BSD KNF indentation style, which is basically the K&R indentation style with character indentation consistent with the file that you're editing. If this is confusing, use spaces to indent and run the sh/ws.sh script to convert spaces to tabs. We value consistency to preserve maintainability.
• Stylistic whitespace

No space immediately inside parentheses.

  while (1) { ...                   /* ok */

  for (i = 0; i < max; i++) { ...   /* ok */

  while ( max ) { ...               /* discouraged */

Commas and semicolons are followed by whitespace.

  int main(int argc, char *argv[]); /* ok */

  for (i = 0; i < max; i++) { ...   /* ok */

No space on arrow operators.

  structure->member = 5;            /* ok */

  structure -> member = 5;          /* bad */

Native language statements (if, while, for, switch, and return) have a separating space; functions do not.

  int my_function(int i);           /* ok, no space */

  while (argc--) ...                /* ok, has space */

  if( var == val )                  /* discouraged */

  switch(foo) ...                   /* discouraged */

Comments should have an interior space and be without tabs.

  /** good single-line doxygen */

  /* good */

  /*bad*/

  /*    discouraged */

  /*  discouraged  */

  /**

   * good:

   * multiple-line doxygen comment

   */

Variable and public API function names should almost always begin with a lowercase letter.

  double localVariable; /* ok */

  double LocalVariable; /* bad (looks like class or    constructor) */

  double _localVar;     /* bad (looks like member variable)      */

Do not use Hungarian notation or its variations to show the type of a variable. An exception can be made for pointers on occasion. The name should be concise and meaningful--typing a descriptive name is preferred to someone spending time trying to learn what the name of the variable means.

  char *name;    /* ok  */

  char *pName;   /* discouraged for new code, but okay */

  char *fooPtr;  /* bad */

  char *lpszFoo; /* bad */

Constants should be all upper-case with word boundaries optionally separated by underscores.

  static const int MAX_READ = 2;  /* ok  */

  static const int arraySize = 8; /* bad */

Public API (global) function names should be in lowercase with underscores to separate words.  Most functions within the core libraries are named with the following convention: [library]_[group]_[action]

  bu_vls_strcat()

  bn_mat_transpose()

Naming exceptions are allowed where the API intentionally mirrors some other familiar programming construct--for example, bu_malloc()+bu_free())--but be as consistent as possible within a file and across a library's API.

• BRL-CAD uses The One True Brace Style from BSD KNF and K&R⁹. Opening braces should be on the same line as their statement; closing braces should line up with that same statement. Functions, however, are treated specially, and we place their opening braces on separate lines.

1. http://www.tcl.tk/^{^}
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX^{^}
3. http://www.cmake.org/^{^}
4. http://subversion.apache.org/^{^}
5. http://developers.slashdot.org/story/05/01/08/1823248/us-army-research-lab-opens-brl-cad-source^{^}
6. See the AUTHORS file in a source distribution.^{^}
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix^{^}
8. See the CHANGES file in a source distribution.^{^}
9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indent_style^{^}