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+# Guidelines for development
+This document outlines the guidelines that should be followed when submitting changes to the WSI layer. Although these
+rules should not be taken as set in stone, we encourage contributors to follow them in order to make the WSI layer
+more maintainable and easier to review.
+
+## Exceptions
+We discourage the use of exceptions in the codebase. The preferred error handling mechanism is to return
+error codes. This closely aligns to the way the Vulkan API returns VkResult error codes to
+indicate an error or success. In addition, some of the libraries used in the layer are written using C rather
+than C++. In order to ensure interoperability between C and C++ code in the layer we have decided to forgo exceptions
+as there is no way for the C code to clean up correctly when an exception is thrown in C++ code.
+
+In some cases you might find that avoiding exceptions is very difficult. As an example we can use the STL
+containers such as std::vector or std::map which, by design, throw exceptions for memory allocation failures.
+In addition, the Vulkan API allows the application to supply custom allocation callbacks for memory allocation by
+passing a VkAllocationCallbacks structure. We must be able to handle these exceptions, possibly caused by failures in
+custom allocators, STL containers, etc., in order to correctly implement the Vulkan API and return the appropriate
+error codes, e.g. VK_ERROR_OUT_OF_HOST_MEMORY.
+
+A good idea is to introduce a wrapper around the STL container to ensure all exceptions are caught and converted to
+error codes that are propagated back to the caller. It is highly recommended to use the
+[utility classes](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/vulkan-wsi-layer/-/tree/master/util) provided by the WSI layer
+if you need an exception-safe wrapper for STL containers:
+ * [util::vector](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/vulkan-wsi-layer/-/blob/master/util/custom_allocator.hpp)
+ * [util::unordered_map](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/vulkan-wsi-layer/-/blob/master/util/unordered_map.hpp)
+ * [util::unordered_set](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/vulkan-wsi-layer/-/blob/master/util/unordered_set.hpp)
+
+For other helper components provided by the WSI layer please see
+[WSI integration document](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/vulkan-wsi-layer/-/blob/master/wsi/README.md#helpers).
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