Circus is an event-driven IRC framework written in ANSI C that provides a simple way to write IRC clients in pure C. Its main purpose is to provide a base to write IRC bots, but it may be extended to implement fully-featured IRC clients.

To compile Circus, you can simply run:

make

If you want to enable debug messages, you can also compile Circus with debug support. It might be too verbose, so you'd better use it just during development:

make DEBUG=1

This will compile the Circus library and build all the examples in the examples directory, so you can start playing with them. It is a good starting point to modify the existing examples and make them do some cool stuff :)

Before you start coding, it is usually a good idea to run the unit tests. This way you will make sure everything is working as expected:

make test

If you want to install the library, you can do it as usual. It will be installed by default in /usr/local, but you can customize the installation directory by adding the PREFIX parameter:

make install                       # Installs Circus in /usr/local
make install PREFIX=<install dir>  # Installs Circus in <install dir>

If you want to test performance, you can run the little benchmark tool as follows:

cd src/test
./circus-bnchk 1000000

This will generate and process the provided number of events (one million in this example) and print some metrics, such as the average time spent processing each event or the total execution time.

To build your own Circus application, you can take a look at the examples folder. There you will find the Makefile.example file that you can copy and modify to build your application. The example Makefile assumes that you installed Circus in a default location (such as /usr or /usr/local); if you installed it in a different place, you may need to configure the CFLAGS and the LDFLAGS variables accordingly.

When including the Circus header files in your source code files, you can include them as follows:

#include <circus/irc.h>

The code examples include the library in a different way, because they point to the library in the compilation directory. The common pattern is, however, to have the Circus library installed in your system and reference the headers files as shown above.

Also take into account that circus uses POSIX threads to dispatch events to the user defined callbacks. Make sure you link the pthread library when building your application.

Contributions are always welcome. Feel free to share your code!

• Fork the project.
• Create a topic branch for your feature or bug fix.
• Develop in the just created topic branch.
• Add tests for your changes. This is important so I don't break them in a future version unintentionally.
• Commit.
• Rebase to the latest upstream version to make sure your topic branch is up to date.
• Send me a pull request.

If you find any issue or want to ask for a feature, please submit your request to the Bug tracking system and I'll do my best to fix/add it.

This sowftare is licensed under the MIT license. See LICENSE file for details.