| Developer(s) | GNOME Foundation |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 2.30.0 / September 27, 2011 |
| Preview release | 2.29.92 / September 18, 2011 |
| Development status | Active |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Platform | Cross-platform |
| Available in | Multilingual |
| Type | Library |
| License | GNU Lesser General Public License |
| Website | http://library.gnome.org/devel/glib/ |
GLib is a cross-platform software utility library that began as part of the GTK+ project. However, before releasing version 2 of GTK+, the project's developers decided to separate non-GUI-specific code from the GTK+ platform, thus creating GLib as a separate product. GLib was released as a separate library so other developers, those that did not make use of the GUI-related portions of GTK+, could make use of the non-GUI portions of the library without the overhead of depending on a full-blown GUI library.
Since GLib is a cross-platform library, applications using it to interface with the operating system are usually portable across different operating systems without major changes.[1]
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GLib provides advanced data structures, such as memory chunks, doubly and singly linked lists, hash tables, dynamic strings and string utilities, such as a lexical scanner, string chunks (groups of strings), dynamic arrays, balanced binary trees, N-ary trees, quarks (a two-way association of a string and a unique integer identifier), keyed data lists, relations and tuples. Caches provide memory management.
GLib implements functions that provide threads, thread programming and related facilities such as primitive variable access, mutexes, asynchronous queues, secure memory pools, message passing and logging, hook functions (callback registering) and timers. Also message passing facilities such as byte order conversion and I/O channels.
Some other features of GLib include:
For many applications, C with GLib is an alternative to C++ with STL (see GObject for a detailed comparison).
The Apache Portable Runtime has a large functional overlap with GLib, and provides many similar OS-portable threading, network and data structure implementations in C.
Other widget toolkits usually also provide low-level functions and implementations of data structures. For instance, in the wxWidgets library the non-GUI functions are in the wxBase library, and in Qt the non-GUI parts are in the QtCore module, which is written in C++.
GLib package consists of 5 libraries:
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