Disallow empty block statements (no-empty)

[tunnckoCore]

Digging more and more in ESLint rules, i found some good ones which enforces good style and more readable code. This issue is for no-empty rule - not fixable.

Suggested configuration.

{
  "no-empty": ["error", { "allowEmptyCatch": true }]
}

Never seen a point for doing such things. It is just waste of code and is messy, adding needless branches.

For what god reason this make sense

var foo = true // or false, no matter
if (foo) {}

I've seen such code here and there over the years, but mostly if i remember correctly it was because if-elseif combo like

let foo = true
if (foo) {
} else if (foo === 123) {
  // ok
}

But again, it not make any sense.

[feross]

Thanks for the request. We need to evaluate the ecosystem impact of this.

[tunnckoCore]

Yea, i'm curious too. But don't think it will be big, huh.. i hope, it would be bad signal for the js community.

[ghost]

I don't feel the value this adds outweighs the complexity it adds in coding standard. Let's please KISS this library and let ESLint serve the persnickety.

[feross]

I really wanted to like this rule, and the ecosystem impact is only 3 repos! But all 3 repos are mine! These are all pretty low-level modules, so these snippets aren't necessarily the clearest. But it's not obvious how I would rewrite these snippets to remove the empty block.

webtorrent:

while (self._request(wire, piece, self._critical[piece] || hotswap)) {}

bittorrent-protocol:

while (this.read()) {} // consume and discard the rest of the stream data

ieee754:

for (; nBits > 0; e = (e * 256) + buffer[offset + i], i += d, nBits -= 8) {}

For that reason, I'm -1 on this. Unless other collaborators have thoughts they'd like to chime in...

[dcousens]

If we could limit it to that idiom, that'd be fine.

Your for loop could easily be re-written [more clearly too]:

while (nBits > 0) {
  e = (e * 256) + buffer[offset + i]
  i += d
  nBits -= 8
}

[dcousens]

Perhaps ask the eslint team for a special case to allow empty while blocks?

[feross]

@dcousens Fair point about the for-loop!

Does someone want to volunteer to request this option from the ESLint team? If you do it, please post the link here so I can subscribe to it :)

[dcousens]

@tunnckoCore ? :P

[tunnckoCore]

I don't have the time currently.

As we seen, from whole community only @feross is using such things hehe. As seen, there's always better approach instead of some tricky bytes - that's javascript: tons of available ways, one best! haha

[feross]

I think we can merge this now with this config:

no-empty: ["error", { "allowEmptyCatch": true }]

The examples I pointed out before can be worked around by including a comment inside the empty body, which explains the reason that it's empty. I think this might have been an addition later to the rule?

And the other example can be rewritten as @dcousens pointed out.

Let's include in standard 16.