skalibs: a C library for system programming

skalibs

What is it ?

skalibs is a package centralizing the free software / open source C development files used for building all software at skarnet.org: it contains essentially general-purpose libraries. You will need to install skalibs if you plan to build skarnet.org software. The point is that you won't have to download and compile big libraries, and care about portability issues, everytime you need to build a package: do it only once.

skalibs can also be used as a sound basic start for C development. There are a lot of general-purpose libraries out there; but if your main goal is to produce small and secure C code with a focus on system programming, skalibs might be for you.

Installation

Requirements

A Unix-like system, compliant with The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7, with a standard C development environment
GNU make, version 3.81 or later

Licensing

skalibs is free software. It is available under the ISC license.

Download

The current released version of skalibs is 2.15.0.0. You can access its checksum here.
Alternatively, you can checkout a copy of the skalibs git repository:
```
 git clone git://git.skarnet.org/skalibs 
```
There's also a Codeberg mirror, or a GitHub mirror, or a SourceHut mirror of the skalibs git repository

Compilation

See the enclosed INSTALL file for installation details.
skalibs sports a few uncommon options to its ./configure script. This page documents them in detail.

Upgrade notes

This page lists the differences to be aware of between the previous versions of skalibs and the current one.

Cross-compilation

Cross-compilation is tricky. skalibs provides system-agnostic interfaces, so all the other skarnet.org packages cross-compile easily; but some effort needs to be made to cross-compile skalibs, see this page.

Reference

Libraries

The skarnet library interface

Similar work

Here are a few other libraries originating from the same place as skalibs, i.e. people start to reuse and package, or rewrite, code from Dan J. Bernstein, and then patch after patch, addition after addition, the code evolves into a project of its own:

Wayne Marshall's libasagna, available for instance in the perp package
Felix von Leitner's libowfat
Bruce Guenter's bglibs
Paul Jarc's prjlibs, which also includes libraries for Scheme programming

Related resources

skalibs is discussed on the skaware mailing-list.