Which is the reason to have `detekt - ReturnCount:...

# detekt

[Javier]

Which is the reason to have detekt - ReturnCount: Function generateProperties has 3 return statements which exceeds the limit of 2.?

I would like to avoid nesting and doing multiple returns is easy, readable and avoid nesting, for example:

override fun generateProperties(
        callableId: CallableId,
        context: MemberGenerationContext?
    ): List<FirPropertySymbol> {
        if (callableId.callableName != atomicName) return emptyList()
        val owner: FirClassSymbol<*> = context?.owner ?: return emptyList()

        ...
    }

[Harold Martin]

Having many returns in a function decreases readability since they can be easy to miss when glancing through and thus make it hard to reason about functionality. In general there's something of a code smell if a function can be called with lots of invalid arguments and suggests there may need to be some refactoring of business logic to the callers.

[Javier]

I am not sure if I agree in all use cases. I want to skip that generateProperties function from the visitor does anything based on those statements, how can I do that with less code and/or being more readable?

[eygraber]

Guard clauses (like in your generateProperties function) shouldn't count towards the return count for that rule. Although now that I think about it, that might not be the default behavior and you have to configure it.

[eygraber]

https://detekt.dev/docs/rules/style/#returncount

excludeGuardClauses

[Javier]

That is nice, hope it was true by default