GoKawiilOver the past year, I’ve been working on fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library. It is not a simple wrapper on top of libc; it doesn’t depend on libc except when required to by the platform. To my knowledge, there is nothing like it.
The library is called sp.h . It’s a 15,000 line, single header library written in plain C99. You can find the source code on GitHub, which includes the library itself, lots of example programs, and half a dozen baseball libraries which extend the core. If you prefer to read a few examples and look through the source, head to GitHub first. Otherwise, let’s get on with the pitch!
Table of Contents
Principles
Program directly against syscalls
The fundamental idea is that any C standard library must be written directly against the lowest level primitives available. It is neither useful nor productive to try to emulate, produce, or interface with the decades of cruft that have accumulated between the OS and the code that you yourself write.
Libc is actively harmful
It is tempting to conform to libc, because swaths of code promise to compile and run if you can simply provide an implementation of libc. But more and more, this is untrue.
Libc does not provide a useful interface for any program. Simple programs would rather use a high level language. Sophisticated programs cannot be written with the primitives that it provides. This has been exacerbated over the past decade as asynchronous programming has become more important. A “fast” program is becoming less about solving e.g. register allocation better than the other compiler and more about e.g. using the right kernel primitives to do IO.
Any interface upon which the fundamental unit of IO is FILE* or upon which a substring is a malformed idea is not just annoying. It’s harmful. sp.h casts it aside.
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