Various patterns for safer C programming have been cargo-culting around the industry for decades. Because the language evolves intentionally slowly, these patterns rarely get folded into the language as first-class constructs and are passed down through the generations in a sort of oral tradition of programming.
lib0xc leverages GNUC extensions and C11 features to codify safer C practices and patterns into real APIs with real documentation and real testing. Reduce your casts to and from `void *` with the `context_t` tagged pointer type. Enable type-checked, deferred function invocation with `call_t`. Interrogate structure descriptors with `struct_field_t`. Stop ignoring `-Wint-conversion` and praying you won't regret it when you assign a signed integer to an unsigned integer and use `__cast_signed_unsigned`. These are just a few of lib0xc's standard-library-adjacent offerings.
lib0xc also provides a basic systems programming toolkit that includes logging, unit tests, a buffer object designed to deal with types, a unified Mach-O and ELF linker set, and more.
Everything in lib0xc works with clang's bounds-safety extensions if they are enabled. Both gcc and clang are supported. Porting to another environment is a relatively trivial effort.
It's not Rust, and it's not type safety, but it's not supposed to be. It's suppsoed to help you make your existing C codebase significantly safer than it was yesterday.
My employer holds the copyright and has permitted its release under the MIT license.
0 comments
—
Show HN: Lib0xc, the C standard library you wish you had · HackerTrans
lib0xc leverages GNUC extensions and C11 features to codify safer C practices and patterns into real APIs with real documentation and real testing. Reduce your casts to and from `void *` with the `context_t` tagged pointer type. Enable type-checked, deferred function invocation with `call_t`. Interrogate structure descriptors with `struct_field_t`. Stop ignoring `-Wint-conversion` and praying you won't regret it when you assign a signed integer to an unsigned integer and use `__cast_signed_unsigned`. These are just a few of lib0xc's standard-library-adjacent offerings.
lib0xc also provides a basic systems programming toolkit that includes logging, unit tests, a buffer object designed to deal with types, a unified Mach-O and ELF linker set, and more.
Everything in lib0xc works with clang's bounds-safety extensions if they are enabled. Both gcc and clang are supported. Porting to another environment is a relatively trivial effort.
It's not Rust, and it's not type safety, but it's not supposed to be. It's suppsoed to help you make your existing C codebase significantly safer than it was yesterday.
My employer holds the copyright and has permitted its release under the MIT license.