NATS - The Cloud Native Messaging System

https://nats.io/contributing/ Code Review Criteria Knowing what’s likely to be accepted or rejected and why is a key consideration in deciding whether and what to contribute. The criteria below are things we think about and look for in any proposed change. We have Performance, Stability, Simplicity, and Security in mind at all times.

Simply put, changes that have many or large positives, and few negative effects or risks, are much more likely to be merged, and merged quickly. Risky and less valuable changes are very unlikely to be merged, and may be rejected outright rather than receive iterations of review.

Pluses

Fixes the root cause of a bug in existing functionality Adds functionality or fixes a problem needed by a large number of users Simple, targeted Maintains or improves consistency across supported API languages Easily tested; has tests Reduces complexity and lines of code Change has already been discussed and is known to the committers

Minuses

Non-optional new functionality that negatively affects performance Band-aids a symptom of a bug only Introduces complex new functionality, especially an API that needs to be supported Adds complexity that only helps a niche use case Adds user-space functionality that does not need to be maintained as part of NATS Changes a public API or semantics (rarely allowed) Adds large dependencies Changes versions of existing dependencies Adds a large amount of code Is not modular/targeted – makes lots of modifications in one “big bang” change Breaks existing tests (implying your change is not backwards compatible) Code coverage decreases (implying you didn’t add sufficient tests for new/changed code)