GLib is a bundle of three (formerly five) low-level system

libraries A library is a collection of Document, materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or electronic media, digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a ...

written in C and developed mainly by GNOME. GLib's code was separated from

GTK GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and propriet ...

, so it can be used by software other than GNOME and has been developed in parallel ever since.

Features

GLib provides advanced data structures, such as memory chunks, doubly and singly linked lists,

hash table In computing, a hash table, also known as hash map, is a data structure that implements an associative array or dictionary. It is an abstract data type that maps keys to values. A hash table uses a hash function to compute an ''index'', ...

s, dynamic strings and string utilities, such as a

lexical Lexical may refer to: Linguistics * Lexical corpus or lexis, a complete set of all words in a language * Lexical item, a basic unit of lexicographical classification * Lexicon, the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge * Lex ...

scanner, string chunks (groups of strings), dynamic

arrays An array is a systematic arrangement of similar objects, usually in rows and columns. Things called an array include: {{TOC right Music * In twelve-tone and serial composition, the presentation of simultaneous twelve-tone sets such that the ...

, balanced binary trees, N-ary trees, quarks (a two-way association of a string and a unique integer identifier), keyed data lists, relations, and

tuple In mathematics, a tuple is a finite ordered list (sequence) of elements. An -tuple is a sequence (or ordered list) of elements, where is a non-negative integer. There is only one 0-tuple, referred to as ''the empty tuple''. An -tuple is defi ...

s. Caches provide memory management. GLib implements functions that provide threads, thread programming and related facilities such as primitive variable access, mutexes, asynchronous

queue __NOTOC__ Queue () may refer to: * Queue area, or queue, a line or area where people wait for goods or services Arts, entertainment, and media *''ACM Queue'', a computer magazine * ''The Queue'' (Sorokin novel), a 1983 novel by Russian author ...

s, secure

memory pool Memory pools, also called fixed-size blocks allocation, is the use of pools for memory management that allows dynamic memory allocation comparable to malloc or C++'s operator new. As those implementations suffer from fragmentation because ...

message passing In computer science, message passing is a technique for invoking behavior (i.e., running a program) on a computer. The invoking program sends a message to a process (which may be an actor or object) and relies on that process and its support ...

and logging,

hook function In computer programming, the term hooking covers a range of techniques used to alter or augment the behaviour of an operating system, of applications, or of other software components by intercepting function calls or messages or events passed ...

s (callback registering) and

timer A timer is a specialized type of clock used for measuring specific time intervals. Timers can be categorized into two main types. The word "timer" is usually reserved for devices that counts down from a specified time interval, while devices th ...

s. GLib also includes message passing facilities such as byte order conversion and I/O channels. Some other features of GLib include: * standard macros * warnings and assertions * dynamic loading of modules

Components

The GLib package consisted of five libraries, but they were all merged into one library, since then named simply ''GLib'', and are no longer sustained as standalone libraries. The original libraries were: *

GObject The GLib Object System, or GObject, is a free software library providing a portable object system and transparent cross-language interoperability. GObject is designed for use both directly in C programs to provide object-oriented C-based APIs ...

, an object system including the type system GType * GLib * GModule * GThread * GIO Of these, three continue to reside in distinct subdirectories of the source tree, and so can be thought of as discrete components: GLib, GObject, and GIO. These can be thought of as a software stack: GObject relies on GLib, and GIO provides higher-level functionality that uses both.

History

GLib began as part of the GTK+ project, now named GTK. However, before releasing GTK+ version 2, the project's developers decided to separate code from GTK+ that was not for

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inst ...

s (GUIs), thus creating GLib as a separate software bundle. GLib was released as a separate library so other developers, those not using the GUI-related parts of GTK+, could use the non-GUI parts of the library without the overhead of depending on the full GUI library. Since GLib is a

cross-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software ...

library, applications using it to interface with the

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

are usually portable across different operating systems without major changes.

Releases

Glib is undergoing active development. For a current overview se
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/blob/main/NEWS
The table below documents major patch notes from 1998 to 2022.

Similar projects

Other libraries provide low-level functions and implementations of data structures, including: *

Standard Template Library The Standard Template Library (STL) is a software library originally designed by Alexander Stepanov for the C++ programming language that influenced many parts of the C++ Standard Library. It provides four components called ''algorithms'', '' ...

(STL) –

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

library for data structures and algorithms * Boost – provides some functions for C++, such as threading primitives, similar to what GLib does for C * QtCore – core API of the Qt Framework * wxBase – non-GUI functions of the

wxWidgets wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows) is a widget toolkit and tools library for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for cross-platform applications. wxWidgets enables a program's GUI code to compile and run on several computer platforms with mini ...

library * The

Apache Portable Runtime The Apache Portable Runtime (APR) is a supporting library for the Apache web server. It provides a set of APIs that map to the underlying operating system (OS). Where the OS does not support a particular function, APR will provide an emulation. ...

and Apple Core Foundation have a large functional overlap with GLib, and provide many similar OS-portable threading, network and data structure implementations in C.

References

External links

*
GLib API documentation

GLib Git Source Tree
{{DEFAULTSORT:Glib C (programming language) libraries Free computer libraries Free software programmed in C GNOME libraries GTK Software using the LGPL license