Sorting

Sort your code alphabetically unless you have a documented reason not to.

Article: Sorting

Every developer has a system for where a field goes. The system lives in their head, conflicts with everyone else’s, and is invisible to the next person. Six developers later the struct is sediment: layers, each one a person who did not want to argue. Alphabetical order needs no documentation, no politics and no archaeology. You do not scan; you binary-search.

These seven rules are the formatter half of rabot. rabot fmt rewrites all of them in place; rabot check reports them.

What is sorted, and how

Order is case-insensitive and natural, so field2 comes before field10. Comments before a member move with it. Whitespace stays where it is, so a single-line list stays single-line and blank lines keep their place.

What is left alone

Lists whose order is semantic are never touched: #[repr] types, enums with explicit discriminants, enums deriving PartialOrd or Ord, and struct literals whose initializers may have side effects (reported, not rewritten). Function parameters are never sorted; the article calls calling convention a real exception.