Guidelines for contributing

Contributions of code, ideas, computational experiments, or documentation are welcome. To contribute, please use the standard GitHub Pull Request process. To facilitate integration of your code, you can use a new branch for each Pull Request. You can choose any name you like for the branch you create for this purpose, as long as it does not conflict with the name of an existing branch.

If you contribute C++ code, please:

• Add at least a minimal amount of comments to explain or clarify what the code does.
• Use blank lines generously to separate code blocks.
• Set your editor to convert tabs to 4 spaces.
• To minimize name pollution of the global namespace, all code should be in the ChanZuckerberg::shasta namespace. Do not use using directives at global scope.
• If you need to add a large amount of code to an existing file, consider creating a new file instead.
• Keep in mind that the code is currently compiled using the C++14 standard. Use features in that standard liberally. However, you cannot use C++ features that were introduced in the C++17 standard or that are slated for the C++20 standard.
• For functionality not provided by the standard libraries, you can also use the Boost libraries.
• If possible, avoid adding dependencies on other packages.

To contribute ideas, computational experiments, comments, or criticism, please use the GitHub Issues section of the GitHub repository.

If you contribute documentation, please:

• Put it in the docs directory, so it becomes automatically visible in GitHub Pages.
• Feel free to create new .html files, if appropriate.
• Attempt to harmonize your new materials with the existing documentation, if possible.