CLib

CLib is a header-only library for C99 that implements the most important classes from GLib: GArray, GHashTable, GList and GString.

GLib is a great library that provides some classes that are so useful that you want to use them in every C project. For some of them you might even wish they were part of the C standard libraray.

Unfortunately, GLib is a bit too heavy for many projects. An additional problem that prevents its wide-spread use is its license: Many people don't want to use LGPL licensed code or want to link everything statically which is in many cases prevented by the LGPL.

Therefore CLib implements the APIs of the most important classes as header-only libs under the MIT license.

Usage

Pick the header files of the classes you want to use from src/, copy them to a location in your project where header files are found by the compiler, and include them in your C project files.

When you include a class for the first time in a compilation unit you need to define _CLIB_IMPL to tell the preprocessor that you want the declarations AND the implementations of the functions:

#define _CLIB_IMPL 1
#include <gstring.h>

Whenever you use the same library again in the same compilation unit you only need to include the header file:

#include <gstring.h>

Documentation

Since clib aims to be as API compatible as possible with GLib it is best to look up the respective class in the GLib documentation:

GArray

GHashTable

GList

GString

Most methods are implemented. Missing methods and different behaviour are considered bugs.

Pull requests are welcome!

Out of Memory Errors

This library handles out of memory errors by printing an error message to stderr and terminating the program via a call to exit(1). This behaviour is controversial and depending on your use case it might prevent you from using clib. Unfortunately, this is how GLib handles out of memory errors and since a goal of this lib is to be compatible with GLib we have to handle it the same way.

For most use cases (like the ones for which people use GLib) this shouldn't be a big problem, though.

Building the Tests

Since this library is header-only the only purpose of the build system is to build the tests.

The tests can be built with the following commands on Linux and macOS:

mkdir build
cd build
conan install .. --build=missing
cmake .. -G "Unix Makefiles" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug
make

And on Windows with Visual Studio 2022:

md build
cd build
conan install .. --build=missing
cmake .. -G "Visual Studio 17"
cmake --build . --config Debug

You can create a release build on Linux and macOS with:

cmake .. -G "Unix Makefiles" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
make

And on Windows with:

cmake --build . --config Release

The following build types are supported (only on UNIX):

Name	Description
Debug	Build with debug info but without a sanitizer
Release	Build with full optimization and without debug support
asan	Build with debug and address sanitizer
lsan	Build with debug and leak sanitizer
msan	Build with debug and memory sanitizer
ubsan	Build with debug and undefined behaviour sanitizer

For most development purposes it is best to create an address sanitizer build:

cmake .. -G "Unix Makefiles" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=asan

Asan on Windows

MSVC supports only Asan at the moment. To build with it use the following command:

cmake --build . --config Asan