PlibC A POSIX compliant libc for Windows

About this project

Applications written for Unix often rely on functions that are incomplete or unimplemented in the Microsoft C runtime library.
The Cygwin project emulates a more or less complete Unix environment to run Unix based applications under Windows.
However, this emulation isn't fast and doesn't provide the Windows "Look and Feel".

PlibC (re)implements typical C functions as defined in the POSIX standard and the Single Unix Specification to extend the MS C runtime library without loosing the integration into Windows.

History

This project was started in 2003 by Nils Durner as part of GNUnet. It moved to Sourceforge as an independent project in 2005.

Documentation

The source code documentation is available here.

Acknowledgements

The printf() and scanf() implementation was taken from Felix von Leitner's diet libc.

Wez Furlong from the PHP project has donated the select() implementation.

Success stories

PlibC is known to be used by the following projects:

GNUnet

GNU's decentralized anonymous and censorship-resistant P2P framework

GNU libextractor

A library for meta-data extraction from binary documents

Download

Stable version

The stable releases are available from the file area.

SVN

Anonymous checkout:
svn co https://plibc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/plibc/trunk/plibc

SVN Web interface

ViewVC

How to use it

• Install the MinGW build environment, Libtool and gettext as described here.
• Get other libraries required by your application:
  • MinGW
  • mingwrep
  • GTK+ for Windows
  • GnuWin32
  • POSIX Threads for Win32
• Install PlibC to your MinGW directory (/mingw).
• #include "plibc.h" into your header file(s).
• Add "-lplibc" to the linker flags, for example in configure.ac/configure.in:
  

  # Check system type
  case "$host_os" in
  linux*)
       AC_DEFINE_UNQUOTED(LINUX,1,[This is a Linux system])
       ;;
  *mingw*)
       AC_DEFINE_UNQUOTED(MINGW,1,[This is a MinGW system])
       AC_DEFINE_UNQUOTED(WINDOWS,1,[This is a Windows system])
       AC_DEFINE_UNQUOTED(_WIN32,1,[This is a Windows system])
       LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS -no-undefined -Wl,--export-all-symbols -lws2_32 -lplibc"
       ;;
  *)
       AC_MSG_RESULT(Unrecognised OS $host_os)
       AC_DEFINE_UNQUOTED(OTHEROS,1,[Some strange OS])
  ;;
  esac

• Add a check for ftruncate() to configure.ac/configure.in:
  

  AC_CHECK_FUNCS(ftruncate)

• Call plibc_init() and plibc_shutdown() from your initialization / shutdown function (usually main())
• Convert the calls of reimplemented functions to uppercase:
  

  long long bignum;
  FILE *f = FOPEN("test.dat", "a");
  FPRINTF(f, "Bignum: %llu\n", bignum);
  fclose(fp);

  Your application will then use PlibC's functions under Windows and the usual functions under Unix.
• Use plibc_conv_to_win_path() if you need to convert a path in Unix-style (perhaps from your configuration file) to the Windows style.
• Install the application into a Unix-like filesystem hierarchy:

  C:\Program Files\Your Application\
                       +- bin\
                       +- etc\
                       +- lib\
      

  Only the "bin" directory is required. From there, "..\" is the root directory "/" in Unix terms. This is required to access paths like "/etc/myconf.conf". Files outside this hierarchy can be accessed in the usual way: c:\some\path\file.txt.
• Optionally, create a registry key describing where your application resides:

  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
           +- SOFTWARE
                 +- My Company
                        +- My Application
                               InstallDir     REG_SZ    C:\Program Files\My Application
      

Hosted by