coding_standard: clarify initialization
Clarify how variables are initialized in different gits.
Acked-by: Etienne Carriere <etienne.carriere@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Wiklander <jens.wiklander@linaro.org>
diff --git a/general/coding_standards.rst b/general/coding_standards.rst
index 88fd5c3..dfc699f 100644
--- a/general/coding_standards.rst
+++ b/general/coding_standards.rst
@@ -27,6 +27,21 @@
compilers here, since there are corner cases where compilers cannot
reliably give a warning.
+Variables are initialized according to these general guidelines:
+
+ * Scalars (and types like ``time_t`` which are standardized as scalars)
+ are initialized with ``0``, unless another value makes more sense.
+
+ * For optee_client we need maximum portability. So only initialize
+ struct types (and ``pthread_t``) with ``memset()`` unless there is a
+ good reason not to do so.
+
+ * For the rest of the gits we assume that a recent version of GCC or
+ Clang is used so we initialize structs with ``{ }`` in order to avoid
+ the more clumsy ``memset()`` procedure. Types like ``pthread_t``
+ which can be a scalar or a composite type are initialized with
+ ``memset()`` in order to minimize the amount of future headache.
+
Regarding the checkpatch tool, it is not included directly into this project.
Please use checkpatch.pl from the Linux kernel git in combination with the local
`checkpatch script`_.