Are there C library resources similar to C++'s Boost library?

Question

I don\'t ever recall coming across anything for C that\'s as extensive as C++\'s Boost library.

Answer 1

ACE (Adaptive Communication Environment) is sometimes mentioned. It's not quite an apples-to-apples comparison. Boost provides more "basic building blocks" whereas ACE provides more of an tightly integrated framework geared towards telco products. I have used both extensively and I find Boost vastly superior. One big advantage of Boost is that many of its features will show up in the STL extensions for the upcoming C++0x standard (see, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_Report_1).

Answer 2

Depending on what exactly you're trying to do there is APR (The Apache Portable Runtime library) which is what the Apache http daemon is built on

http://apr.apache.org/

For GUI, there is wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows)

http://www.wxwidgets.org/

Answer 3

Glib does compensate it partially in form of various unicode, string types. If you add Gobject you could get some object programming even some garbage collection.

Answer 4

I've never seen anything. Really, C++ templates are the enabling technology for STL and much of boost, and C doesn't have them. I've seen many C-interface libraries for things like image processing, 3D graphics, networking, etc., but never a real general-purpose library like boost. You can find pieces though - threading libraries, string libraries, etc. - that are similar to sections of boost.

Answer 5

or you can look at ccan http://ccan.ozlabs.org/

but no, there really isn't any complete package, glib comes closest

Answer 6

You can have a look at glib. It provides quite a few interesting things like containers, unicode support, threading...

Have a look at its documentation