The C! or cbang library is a collection of C++ utility libraries developed over the course of +10 years and several major C++ application development projects. It should compile and run on Windows, Linux and OSX using a modern C++ compiler.

Many of the facilities of C! are geared towards cross-platform application development and providing basic services that most applications need such as a configuration system, run-time build information, logging facilities, threads, smart pointers, simple embedded scripting, etc.

C!'s philosophy is to create clean, simple, readable, modular and reusable code. C! also encourages exception based error handling, and light use of C++ templates and C preprocesor macros.

C! "leans" on the venerable boost library but also reimplements several boost APIs which are considered by the author to be too template heavy, less readable or overly complicated in boost.

The code was developed on an as needed basis and was never intended to be any sort of grand unifying system for C++ application development. However, I hope you find many parts of the library useful in your C++ development projects.

For licensing information please see the files LICENSE and COPYING.

• Smart pointers, both thread safe and non, with downcasting capability.
• Threading, mutexes, conditions & thread local storage
• Soft exit & signal handling
• Extensively configurable logging facilities.
• Exception class with stack trace capability including line and file info.
• Exception throwing and catching convenience macros.
• HTTP and HTTPS client and server.
• Socket client and server with asynchronous capability.
• XMacro based enum implementation.
• PyON Python Object Notation language for serializing and deserializing data.
• Simple scripting language for configuration and text based command server.
• Software build information system.
• A system for compiling in a directory tree of resources.
• Network packet automatic byte order and string packing functionality.
• Temporary directories, directory traversal & file operations
• C++ style number, to and from, string conversions.
• iostream utilities.
• Application configuration system.
• XML facilities.
• TAR file read and write.
• Time and timing functions.
• OpenSSL C++ interface.
• IP address / hostname resolution, parsing and manipulation.
• URL parsing.
• Geometric primitives.
• Human readable size & time formatting.
• Many other utility classes.
• Completely contained in it's own C++ namespace.
• Consistent and clean code formating <= 80 column width.

• A modern C++ compiler: GNU C++, Intel C++, MSVS
• SCons http://scons.org/
• bzip2 http://bzip.org/
• zlib http://zlib.net/
• expat http://expat.sourceforge.net/
• openssl http://www.openssl.org/
• sqlite http://www.sqlite.org/
• boost http://www.boost.org/
• v8 http://code.google.com/p/v8/

• Winsock

• IOKit
• CoreFoundation

• pthreads
• libbfd (For debug mode only)

On Debian based systems the prerequisites can be installed with the following command line:

sudo apt-get install scons build-essential libbz2-dev zlib1g-dev \
  libexpat1-dev libssl-dev libboost-iostreams-dev libboost-system-dev \
  libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-regex-dev libsqlite3-dev libv8-dev git

cd cbang
scons

There are a number of build options which can either be passed on the command line to scons or place in a configuration file named 'options.py'. These options are as follows:

• debug - Enable debugging
• optimize - Enable compiler optimizations
• static - Build a static library
• shared - Build a shared library
• strict - Enable strict checking
• distcc - Enable distcc distributed compile system
• ccache - Enable ccache caching compile system
• backtrace_debugger - Enable the printing backtraces

These options are enabled by setting them to 1. For example:

scons debug=1

If you get any build warnings, by default, the build will stop. If you have problems building, especially with warnings related to the boost library you can ignore these warnings by building with scons strict=0. This disables strict checking.

You can testing C! by going to the tests directory in the root of the cbang source tree. Then run:

./testHarness

This section describes some common problems and their solutions.

If you get an error about the openssl library version being too old then you either need to upgrade your package or build openssl from source like this:

wget http://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-1.0.1f.tar.gz
tar xzvf openssl-1.0.1f.tar.gz
cd openssl-1.0.1f
./config
make
export OPENSSL_HOME=$PWD

Then try building C!.

There are many different versions of boost and some systems have broken packages. If you run into these problems you can try C! built-in boost build system like this:

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/boost/1.55.0/boost_1_55_0.tar.bz2
tar xjvf boost_1_55_0.tar.bz2
export BOOST_SOURCE=$PWD/boost_1_55_0

Then rebuild C! as above. Other versions of boost greater or equal to 1.40 may also work.

C! does not work with the latest version of Google's Javascript engine because they have made incompatible changes to the API. C! is known to work with V8 version 3.14. You can build from source like this:

svn co http://v8.googlecode.com/svn/branches/3.14 v8
cd v8
make dependencies
make release werror=no
mkdir lib
cp out/ia32.release/obj.target/tools/gyp/*.a lib
export V8_HOME=$PWD

The build may emit a lot of warnings but werror=no prevents the compiler from treating them as errors. The last three commands copy the compiled libraries to a place where C! can find them and set the environment variable V8_HOME to point to the build directory. You must then build C! in the same terminal or set V8_HOME to the correct value before running scons.