This post goes over some very cool C libraries, each of which is awesome in one way or another. They are generally fairly small and clean, and solve an interesting problem.

I tend to find C libraries that are particularly clean, or which implement a complex concept not usually seen in C, to be very interesting. The very best examples are well engineered or solve a problem in an clean way that fits into the C language.

I've had a chance to use some of these, usually either on Linux or with MSYS2 on Windows. Unfortunately I've never used some of them, but I think they are very cool and I would like to fit some of them into a project some day.

The List

  • log.c provides a very simple logging library with the normal log levels, and control over which levels are printed. Its simple, requires no setup, and does it job. I especially like the terminal coloring and the source file and line references in the log messages. I have been using this in a number of tools recently.

  • ini provides ini file parsing. This is a very simple configuration file format that I use when I don't really care about the file format, I just want a couple of things in a file. This library is trivial to use, and provides a nice way to get data as something else besides strings by providing it scanf-style format strings and a pointer. I have a similar library of my own at work, but this one is available outside of work and is easy to use.

  • lodepng provides a small library for png file encoding and decoding. I had a problem that required generating png files from binary data, and I wanted a quick solution. This library allowed me to get something working quickly, and while I haven't used any of its more advanced features, it was trivial to make the files I wanted.

  • optfetch is a command line argument parser. This is the simplest argument parser I know of, and I use it for just that reason. It only takes a few lines to set up the argument structure, and the library has only one public function. It doesn't support more advanced cli interfaces like subcommands, but if you don't need that kind of thing it is a great, tiny, simple tool that I've used in a number of programs recently.

  • socket99 is a wrapper for socket programming that deals with some of the complexity that always makes network stuff such a pain. It doesn't do everything for you, and doesn't support every type of socket, but I usually just want to open a socket and put some data out- I don't need the full capability or complexity. For those cases, socket99 makes things a little nicer, and I've used in a couple of times recently to good effect.

  • TinyCThread provides the C11 threading API. Its an idiomatic C API and adds mutexes, condition variables, and threads, along with thread specific storage. I've found it useful for writing small, cross platform tools that require some threads and sychronization. The one limitation is that C11 doesn't define a thread-safe message queue structure, so I've had to write my own when I wanted one.

  • mqtt and the implementation mosquitto. This is a pub/sub messaging system with a broker. I was able to set it up pretty easily and get messages from Python into a C program in a couple hours. I like the simplicity and the flexibility of the topic system. I would consider using it if I needed distributed messaging between languages or programs, especially if the source of the data was an embedded system.

  • Unity is a testing framework that I've been using to test code in LabWindows programs. I looked over some testing frameworks to see what would work for testing embedded systems, and this one seems to fit nicely- its simple enough to add to a program, provides the usual testing features, and has room for more advanced usage. This is one that I have used for real code and it has served me well.

  • Theft, a library for property based testing in C. This is a good example of a concept that I would usually consider too advanced for C and left it more in the domain of Haskell. This library is certainly not as easy to use as QuickCheck, but I don't think that it can be given the limitations of C.

  • jsmn is a library for parsing JSON. Its interface is truly simple and manages to avoid building an explicit tree of nodes or requiring memory allocation. This means I would be able to use it in an embedded system (if I had to parse JSON for some reason?). I have been using it to parse configuration files in some LabWindows programs in permissive mode. I liked this library so much I wrapped it in a Rust interface as jsmn-rs.

  • heatshrink is a compression library in C. I like this one because it does not allocate memory and allows tuning performance and streaming. This makes it nice for embedded systems use. I'm not usually doing resource constrained programming, even when programming embedded systems, but if I did I would keep this library in mind.

  • Cello, a library that embeds a great deal of advanced features into C. The list is pretty extensive, but includes polymorphism, garbage collection, reflection, and generic data structures. This is all achieved with fat pointers. I think this library is more of an experiement than a method for writing production C code, but it is at least interesting to look over and understand.

  • Cedux is an implementation of a React-like system in C. The idea is to have an application state that is not modified directly, but only through messages which contain information used to modify the state through a set of registered functions. Its another example of a place where we have a concept not usually seen in C. I don't know how it would place out in practice, but I could imagine certain situations where it could be useful.

  • COS, the C Object System. This is another library for adding features to C that seem out of its reach, like polymorphism and an OOP system like CLOS (from Common Lisp). This one is actually intended to be used for real programming, and in particular it was developed for some style of scientific computing.

  • fann for neural networks in C. The library seems well engineered, and well used. As with many of these, I've never had reason to use it, but if I needed some neural networks in C, I would go here.

  • flann for nearest neighbor calculations. This just seems like a nice clean implementation of an algorithm with some nice features.

  • imgui is an immediate mode GUI library, and the only C++ library in this list. I like the look of this GUI, and it easy enough to set up and use in many languages. I would like to get something in Rust as a tool for work one day. An example of an imgui system in pure C is nukclear, which also looks good. I've never tried it myself, however.

  • cchan provides a channel mechanism with unbounded queueing.

  • Talloc provides a tree of memory allocations where freeing memory takes care of freeing children in the tree. It also has a way to register destructor callbacks to call when an allocation is freed.

  • rax is an implementation of a radix tree in C. It just seems like a nicely engineering and practically designed library that I would like to use one day, if I ever had a radix-tree shaped problem to solve.

  • nng aka nanomsg-next-generation is a successor to ZeroMQ and nanomsg which provides a messaging system with some protocols built in for building up communication systems out of components. I like this more then other options because it is easier to build, pure C, and small. I would like to use it for something one day, like some kind of distributed, multilingual ground system, but have not actually tried it yet.

Conclusion

I hope some of these are interesting to someone. I know there is overlap with Awesome C and there are some other good libraries at ccan, but these are ones I'm particularly drawn to.