Is there any Boost equivalent library for C?

Question

Is there any Boost equivalent library for C?

Answer 1

The best I can think of is the Apache Portable Runtime project.

From Wikipedia on APR:

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 doesn't support a particular function, APR will provide an emulation. Thus programmers can use the APR to make a program truly portable across platforms.

APR originally formed a part of Apache HTTP Server, but the Apache Software Foundation spun it off into a separate project. Other applications can use it to achieve platform independence.

Functionality:

• Memory allocation and memory pool functionality
• Atomic operations
• Dynamic library handling
• File I/O
• Command-argument parsing
• Locking
• Hash tables and arrays
• Mmap functionality
• Network sockets and protocols
• Thread, process and mutex functionality
• Shared memory functionality
• Time routines
• User and group ID services

Answer 2

Another candidate would be Glib. It provides a bunch of functionality that is very useful, but not part of the C language or the C library. Stuff that is in the standard API in languages like Java or C#:

GLib is a cross-platform software utility library that began as part of the GTK+ project. [...] GLib provides advanced data structures, such as memory chunks, doubly and singly linked lists, hash tables, dynamic strings and string utilities [...] GLib implements functions that provide threads, thread programming and related facilities [...] Some other features of GLib include:

• standard macros
• warnings and assertions
• dynamic loading of modules
• a type system, GType
• an object system, GObject

( Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glib )

Answer 3

Core Foundation is a framework written in C by Apple.

It has:

• File IO
• Networking
• Bundle loading
• String manipulation (with Unicode support!)
• Data manipulation
• Interprocess communication
• Date handling
• XML parsing
• Localization
• Easy memory management (using reference counting)
• Property lists (kind of file format to hold data)
• Streaming
• Arrays, sets, dictionaries, bags and bitvectors
• Notifications (kind of goto but you don't know where they go, powerful but watch out)
• Endianness translation
• Much more

If you need to support operating systems that are not Mac OS X, you can use CFLite which is open source.