GLib

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Glib" redirects here. Glib can also be an adjective.

GLib is a cross-platform utility library. It started life as part of the GTK+ project, but is now used by other applications. While it was originally a convenient library to collect low-level code in, it has since expanded into offering wrapper functions for functionality that is typically different across platforms. GLib is now the cross-platform component that makes applications portable across different operating systems.

Some features of GLib include:

basic types and their limits
standard macros
type conversions
byte order
memory allocation
warnings and assertions
message logging
timers
string utilities
hook functions
a lexical scanner
dynamic loading of modules
threads
memory pools
automatic string completion.
a type system, GType
an object system, GObject

A number of data structures (and their related operations) are also defined, including:

memory chunks
doubly- and singly-linked lists
hash tables
strings (which can grow dynamically)
string chunks (groups of strings)
arrays (which can grow in size as elements are added)
balanced binary trees
N-ary trees
quarks (a two-way association of a string and a unique integer identifier)
keyed data lists (lists of data elements accessible by a string or integer id)
relations and tuples (tables of data which can be indexed on any number of fields)
caches.