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Closed 9 years ago.
I'm looking for a C library with common reusable data structures like linked lists, hash tables etc. Something like the source distributed with Mastering Algorithms with C (Paperback) by Kyle Loudon.
BSD queue.h has:
SLIST = singly linked list
LIST = doubly linked list
SIMPLEQ = singly linked queue
TAILQ = doubly linked queue
BSD tree.h has:
RB - red-black tree
SPLAY - splay tree
See the queue(3) and tree(3) man pages for details. I really like them because they are pure C macros without dependencies (not even libc). Plus with the BSD license you don't have to worry about any company restrictions w/ GPL.
Gnome provides an excellent library for this, called Glib, with many useful data structures and other utilities as well.
gnulib, the gnu portability library.
It's distributed as source code.
This list is from its module list, which includes a TON of other things. One interesting one is "c-stack: Stack overflow handling, causing program exit."
list
array-list
carray-list
linked-list
avltree-list
rbtree-list
linkedhash-list
avltreehash-list
rbtreehash-list
sublist ( Sequential list data type backed by another list. )
oset (Abstract ordered set.)
array-oset
avltree-oset
rbtree-oset
SGLIB is an excellent generic data-structures library. The library currently provides generic implementations for:
sorting arrays
linked lists
sorted linked lists
double linked lists
red-black trees
hashed containers
It's very fast, faster than glib. It's inspired by the Standard Template Library. Download Here
Another solution is Attractive Chaos software.
C macro library:
kbtree.h: efficient B-tree library in C.
khash.h: fast and light-weighted hash table library in C.
kvec.h: simple vector container in C.
Sglib and Attractive Chaos software are C macros library. Using void* to implement generic containers in C may be inefficient. C macros mimics C++ template and are as efficient as C++ template
The GDSL Library might be a good thing to consider:
http://home.gna.org/gdsl/
The Apache Portable Runtime.
CLIB
AT&T's software tools.
Related
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Closed 9 years ago.
I am primarily a C and C++ programmer and i often need to quickly comprehend the structure of very large code bases (gcc, linux kernel). I wonder if there are any tools to help in this regard. I am particularly interested in call graphs, data structure references across the project, include dependency graphs, quick symbol location, etc. I known about ctags and cscope but i am looking for something with more visualization like a call graph that allows to quickly locate definition of a function, root the graph at a particular call, inverting it (i.e. locating all calls to a given function), etc.
If you want to build call graphs, you could roll your own with GCC's -finstrument-functions.
Basically, when you compile a program with that option enabled, GCC calls the following functions whenever the target program enters or exits a function:
void __cyg_profile_func_enter (void *this_fn,
void *call_site);
void __cyg_profile_func_exit (void *this_fn,
void *call_site);
What you need to do is define these functions, and write in your logic to produce the call graph there.
This extremely thorough tutorial explains how you could produce a call graph using -finstrument-functions and GraphViz. All the tools involved are FOSS and gratis.
Of course:
The graphs GraphViz produces are stand-alone, and not part of an IDE.
I'm not really sure if producing a call-graph of Linux (the kernel) is possible in this way.
Please try and use SourceInsight. It is quite helpful with browsing code and understanding it. It provides most of the features requested by you.
You could try cflow. It gives you a graf of the calls of functions inside. It is not very flexible though.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm writing program which translate Pascal to C and need some help. I started with scanner generator Flex. I defined some rules and created scanner which is working more or less ok. It breaks Pascal syntax into tokens, for now it's only printing what it found. But I have no idea what should I do next. Are there any articles or books covering this subject? What is the next step?
Why do you want to do such a Pascal to C converter?
If you just want to run some Pascal programs, it is simpler to use (or improve) existing compilers like gpc, or Pascal to C translators, like e.g. p2c
If you want to convert hand-written Pascal code to humanly-readable (and improvable) C code, the task is much more difficult; in particular, you probably want to convert the indentation, the comments, keep the same names as much as possible -but avoiding clashes with system names- etc!
You always want to parse some abstract syntax tree, but the precise nature of these trees is different. Perhaps flex + bison or even ANTLR may or not be adequate (you can always write a hand-written parser). Also, error recovery may or not be important to you (aborting on the first syntax error is very easy; trying to make sense of an ill-written syntactically-incorrect Pascal source is quite hard).
If you want to build a toy Pascal compiler, consider using LLVM (or perhaps even GCC middle-end and back-ends)
You might want to take a look at "Translating Between Programming Languages Using A Canonical Representation And Attribute Grammar Inversion" and references therein.
The most common approach would be to build a parse tree in your front end, and then walk through that tree outputting the equivalent C in the back end. This gives you the flexibility to perform any reordering of declarations that's required (IIRC Pascal supports use before declaration, but C doesn't). If you're using flex for the scanner, tradition would dictate using bison for the parser, although there are alternatives. If you look, you can probably find a freely available Pascal syntax in the format expected by bison.
You have to know the Pascal grammar, the C grammar and built (design) a "something" (i.e. a grammar or an automata...) that can translate every Pascal rule in the corresponding C rule.
Than, once you have your tokenized stream, using some method like LR, you can find the semantic tree which correspond to the sequence of Pascal rule applied and convert every rule in the corresponding C rule (this can be easly done with Bison).
Pay attention that Pascal and C have not Context Free grammars, so more control will be necessary.
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Closed 11 years ago.
After doing some work with Ruby, Rails, and RSpec last summer and I learned to TATFT. Now I can't write code without writing tests first.
I'm taking a programming course in C next year, and I would like to learn to write C test-driven. Is it a good idea (or even possible) to do TDD with C? If so, are there any good testing frameworks compatible with C?
Is it a good idea (or even possible) to do TDD with C?
Yes, it obviously is a good idea, as with other languages. However, due to the procedural nature of the language, it comes with its some more difficulties.
Static functions quickly get in the way. This can be solved by including the source file under test, or defining a STATIC macro that only means static when compiling the code for production - not unit test
#if defined(UNIT_TEST)
#define STATIC
#else
#define STATIC static
#endif
There is no isolation: there is only one global context. With an OO language you can just instantiate one object (or a cluster of collaborating objects) to test it (them), you can also use mock objects.
With C, you can, however, override functions just by re-defining them in your unit tests. This works fine on Unix-like systems where the linker invokes the first function he is finding - I'm not sure on Windows.
If so, are there any good testing
frameworks compatible with C?
You can start small with minunit. The learning curve is flat as it only is four macros long.
EDIT: There are two lists of UT frameworks for the C language, that were mentioned in other answers and I didn't repeat : one on Wikepedia and another one on xprogramming.com.
We use "check" from http://check.sourceforge.net/, it provides basic functionality for testsuites and tests (similiar to junit), but is fairly lightweight. On feature I like is that it handles if your test dumps code and considers that a failure.
Also note "check" is a "C" based framework rather than a "C++" one.
I just discovered CSpec, which does BDD in C. Doesn't look very mature, but it reminds me of RSpec.
There are a number of unit testing harnesses for C. Wikipedia has a much better list than I could assemble here.
If you are actually using a C++ compiler, but using it in 'C' mode by compiling .c files, then, also, any of the C++ unit test frameworks will work OK.
Take a look at the original list of xUnit frameworks at http://www.xprogramming.com/software.htm
This similar question also has a lot of answers "Unit Testing C Code"
I used RCUNIT, it is mature and has everything I need. I have also used ipl canata which is great but is very expensive so that is probability not what you want.
You certainly can do unit testing in C (I do). The framework I use (for the Windows platform) is CunitWin32
Here is the list of unit test frameworks for c:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unit_testing_frameworks#C
enjoy it!
So a proper C programmer will tell you that because C is statically typed it catches all bugs you might have and therefore you don't need a unit test framework.
They are full of shit, but that's the argument for statically type languages like C.
I think you should probably take the approach that Adobe did with Photoshop. Write a series of core libraries in C, and then all the glue and real logic of the application should be in a higher level language. Photoshop is mostly written in Lua, but many languages work for this.
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Does anyone know of any C container libraries? I am looking for something which gives standard implementations of linked lists, arrays, hash tables etc, much in the same way as the C++ STL does. Key concerns are:
Client code should be able to create containers for multiple different data types without modifying the library.
The interface for creating and using the containers should be intuitive.
I just came across SGLIB while looking for a C implementation of a map/dictionary container. Unfortunately, no map but it seems to include the containers you asked about. I have no idea how good it is.
http://sglib.sourceforge.net.
Sglib is an excellent generic data structures library. The library currently provides generic implementation for:
sorting arrays
linked lists
sorted linked lists
double linked lists
red-black trees
hashed containers
It's very fast. Faster that glib. It's inspired by the Standard Template Library. Download here
Another solution is Attractive Chaos sotware. C macro library:
kbtree.h: efficient B-tree library in C.
khash.h: fast and light-weighted hash table library in C.
kvec.h: simple vector container in C.
Kulesh Shanmugasundaram presents the generic Linux Kernel Linked List and a generic hash table based in the Linux Kernel Linked List.
Sglib and Attractive Chaos sotware and Linux Kernel Linked List are C macro libraries. Using void* to implement generic containers in C may be inefficient. C macros mimic C++ templates and are as efficient as a C++ template.
Chuck Falconer has a decent hash library written in C that includes a C++ interface, click on hashlib.zip on the webpage to download.
Ben Pfaff has very nice and extremely well-documented binary and balanced tree library, GNU libavl, that implements most major tree structures including binary search trees, AVL trees, red-black trees and threaded versions of each.
libavl is licensed under the LGPL (as of version 2.0.3), hashlib is GPL.
I'm not sure what you are looking for as far as arrays and linked lists go as the former is supported directly by the language and the latter is generally trivial enough to implement without warranting a library.
How about ccl? This is a container library which has been (unsuccessfully) proposed for C standard. Maybe it's best fit for you. You can see https://code.google.com/p/ccl/ https://github.com/jacob-navia/ccl.
Enjoy it.
I've been using a library I've been growing from Hanson's "C Interface and Implementations" book. His source is downloadable at
cii book website
Everything is an Abstract Data Type. There is List, Set, Table (map).
#include "queue.h" to get access to the implementations of singly-linked lists, singly-linked tail queues, lists and tail queues.
I found a generic cache for storing arbitrary objects in memory by D. J. Bernstein (http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html) to be both clean, simple and super fast. Look up cache.h and cache.c in djdns tarball.
Some of the ones that I have heard of (but never used) are
Glib
iMatix Standard Function Library
disparate elements from the Linux kernel headers (e.g. list)
This seems to cover most of the containers and some algorithms. There is also no licensing, all the headers contain - 'code may be used without restriction.' http://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?txtCodeId=13867&lngWId=3
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Closed 10 years ago.
Can anyone suggest me a helpful programming language which can be used to create a tool which will analyse the given C program and generate a txt report or html report containing information about the given program (function list, variable list etc).
The program I intend to build is similar to doxygen but i want it for my personal use.
ctags, perhaps?
Ctags generates an index (or tag) file of language objects found in source files that allows these items to be quickly and easily located by a text editor or other utility. A tag signifies a language object for which an index entry is available (or, alternatively, the index entry created for that object).
Both Python and Perl have excellent string processing capabilities.
I'd suggest using something like ctags to parse the program, and just create a script to read the ctags file and output in txt/html.
The file format used by ctags is well-defined so that other programs can read it. See http://ctags.sourceforge.net for more information on ctags itself and the file it uses.
You're opening a big can of worms, this isn't an effective use of your time, blah blah blah, etc.
Moving on to an answer, if you're talking about anything beyond trivial analysis and you need accuracy, you will need to parse the C source code. You can do that in any language, but you will almost certainly want to generate your parser from a high-level grammar. There are any number of tools for that. A modern and particularly powerful parser generator is ANTLR; there are a number of ANTLR grammars for C, including easier-to-work-with subsets.
Look into scripting languages. I'd recommend Python or Perl.
Haskell has a relatively recent language-c project http://www.sivity.net/projects/language.c which allows the analysis of C code.
If you are familiar with Haskell, then it might be worth a look. Even if you are not, it might be interesting to have a go.
If it's a programming language you want then I'd say something which is known for string processing power so that would mean perl.
However the task you require can be rather complicated since you need to 'know' the language, so you would require to follow the same steps the compiler does, being lexical and grammatical analyses on the language (think flex, think yacc) in order to truly 'know' what meaning those strings have.
Perhaps the best starting point is to take a look at doxygen and try to reuses as much of the work done there as possible
Lex/yacc are appropriate for building parsers.
pycparser is a complete parser for ANSI C89/C90 written in pure Python. It's being widely used to analyze C source code for various needs. It comes with some example code, such as listing all the function definitions in files, etc.