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GX - Generic eXtra library for C

This repository is public but "unknown" at the moment. I intend to blog about it / present it / submit to reddit & hacker news etc. later. If you're reading this, you're early.

Some of the header files are generally awesome and may find general appeal.

We're using lots of this in some mission-critical systems stuff at Justin.tv/Twitch.tv.

Some of the header files are probably only interesting to me.

General philosophy:

  • Optimized for Linux (2.6.33 +), but compiles/runs well enough on Mac OS.
  • Header-files only- no compiled libraries etc.
  • Interfaces generally laid out, but specific optimizations and sometimes function implementations etc. only implemented when actually needed (by myself or at someone else's request).
  • C, but not necessarily idiomatic C. Definitely not idiomatic C++, although you can probably get it all to work w/ C++.
  • Lots of GCC-specific stuff/extensions at the moment, but I have no objection to porting to other compilers as needed.
  • MIT licensed

Some of the important current modules:

Header Summary
gx Lots of small stuff. Resource pools. Clone wrapper...
gx_error Awesome error handling/logging idioms & macros to make code look good.
gx_event Very highly tuned event-loop. Like a faster and feature-reduced libev w/ special tcp tuning
gx_ringbuf Super-optimized memory-mapped ringbuffers (circular buffers) & ringbuffer-pools.

NOTES:

  • Most stuff is born in gx.h and then moves into its own header when it either gets too big or too esoteric. I suppose some things may eventually get big enough or decoupled enough to become its own project/library altogether, but at the moment most of the stuff here is pretty interdependent.
  • Most of the zerocopy stuff isn't implemented yet. Generic functionality is implemented when a specific fd-fd combination is first needed, and then optimize later.

Lesser modules:

Header Summary
gx_zerocopy IO directives for highly optimized data transfer between fds of various types.
gx_pool High level macro for creating an intrusive resource pool of a given struct
gx_log The logging part for error handling, along with misc. logging.
gx_string Macros for quickly doing inline sprintf-like operations without allocating memory
gx_net Wrappers for common network/socket needs.
gx_system (Semi)-portable wrapper for getting local & system-wide usage & performance etc.
gx_endian Runtime-endianness detection and eventually a bunch of utilities... NEEDS WORK
gx_token Plans on building secure crypto self-referencing auth tokens in a somewhat generic way.

Incubator:

Header Summary
gx_cpus (Semi)-portable wrapper for determining # of cpus, cpu-affiliation, timing, etc.
gx_pdv (Persistent Data Vector) Will be an extension of gx_mfd for dataflow/pipe programming
gx_shuttle Eventually a generalization of some C hot-code-swapping stuff I'm doing
gx_time Eventually an awesome time module
gx_thread At the moment, just a "very" lightweight thread on linux using clone
gx_mqueue Soon to be a posix message-queue wrapper with fallback to SysV message queues

Depricated:

Header Summary
gx_mfd Memory-fd. Mmap fun & selectable/pollable fd's that trigger events when a variable changes.

TMP TODO

  • Clean up file headings, license statements etc.
  • ifndef ..._H wrapper around all
  • Possibly C++ wrapper around all
  • Mark unfinished functions & deprecated ones
  • Fill in some known incomplete functions w/ compile-time-errors
  • Remove the nonstarter gx_ * headers
  • Possibly clean up namespace and _gx conventions...
  • Allow for different pool names
  • Remove this section from the readme

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Generic eXtra C macros. Miscellaneous, probably of little interest to anyone beside myself.

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