My personal C/C++ library. All the little things I keep rewriting for every nontrivial project. This was largely born out of frustration while working on Short Circuit.

Note: This library is absolutely neither stable nor mature, and not ready for any kind of external use at this time. Show-stopping bugs probably exist, and the API may change drastically without any notice.

• Growable byte buffer.
• Hash table (open addressing, Robin Hood).
• Cache.
• Intrusive singly and doubly-linked lists.
• Priority queue (binary heap, WIP).
• Logging (to arbitrary FILE* outputs).
• Pool allocator.
• Nicer strings.
• Refcounting.

• Simple and lightweight — <3 kLOC.
• Type-generic data structures — (Ab)uses preprocessor macros to imitate C++ templates.
• C++ friendly — All headers are compatible, and convenient C++ wrappers are provided where appropriate (C++ is not required, however).

Build dependencies:

• A C compiler supporting C11.
• Meson 1.3.0 or later.

Note: C11 support means genuine standard-compliant C11 support. For MSVC, this means VS2019 or newer is required.

Test suite dependencies:

• A C++ compiler supporting C++17.

To build, ensure all submodules are in place (git submodule update --init --recursive), and run meson setup <BUILDDIR> to set up the build system in BUILDDIR. A script which generates a set of build directories for various configurations is also provided (./configure) for convenience's sake. Then, run meson compile -C <BUILDDIR> to build.

To run the test suite, simply run meson test -C <BUILDDIR>.

Meson projects should easily be able to hook into the build system using subproject. The Meson build system provides dependencies a3_dep.

Projects using other build systems can invoke Meson directly and depend on the library produced (or they can simply build it themselves — take look at meson.build for inspiration).

Alternatively, the project may be built with Nix. Simply running nix build will produce a release build installed under ./result (a symlink to the Nix store). Additional build configurations are also available. For example, a debug build on Clang can be invoked using nix build .#a3/clang/debug.

Most objects (buffer, hash table, linked list, etc...) provide the following functions to do with their lifecycle:

• void X_init(X*, [...]) initializes a new object.
• X* X_new([...]) allocates and initializes (by calling X_init) a new object.
• void X_destroy(X*) deinitializes an object and frees its owned memory.
• void X_free(X*) deinitializes (by calling X_destroy) and frees an object.

This vaguely mirrors the C++ object lifecycle, where X_new and X_free mimic new and delete, and X_init and X_destroy are the constructor and destructor.

For objects with value semantics (A3String), there is no init or destroy, and new returns a value, not a pointer. free still takes a pointer so that it can invalidate internal pointers.

liba3 is licensed under the 3-clause BSD license, the terms of which are described here.

liba3 uses the following third-party projects:

The project links with HighwayHash, which is licensed under the Apache license.

The test suite uses Google Test, which is licensed under the 3-clause BSD license.