UCommon is meant as a very light-weight C library to facilitate using C design patterns even for very deeply embedded applications, such as for systems using uclibc along with posix threading support.
For this reason, UCommon disables language features that consume memory or introduce runtime overhead, such as rtti and exception handling, and assumes one will mostly be linking applications with other pure C based libraries rather than using the overhead of the standard C library and other similar class frameworks.
UCommon introduces some Objective-C based design patterns, such as reference counted objects, memory pools, smart pointers, and offers dynamic typing through very light use of inline templates for pure type translation that are then tied to concrete base classes to avoid template instantiation issues.
C auto-variable automation is also used to enable referenced objects to be deleted and threading locks to be released that are acquired automatically when methods return rather than requiring one to explicitly code for these things.
UCommon depends on and when necessary will introduce some portable C replacement functions, especially for sockets, such as adding getaddrinfo for platforms which do not have it, or when threadsafe versions of existing C library functions are needed.
Basic socket support for connecting to named destinations and multicast addresses, and binding to interfaces with IPV4 and IPV6 addresses is directly supported. Support for high resolution timing and Posix realtime clocks are also used when available.
While UCommon has been influenced by GNU Common C , it introduces some new concepts for handling of thread locking and synchronization and also builds all higher level thread synchronization objects directly from conditionals.
Hence, on platforms which for example do not have rwlocks, barriers, or semaphores, these are still found in UCommon. A common and consistent call methodology is used for all locks, whether mutex, rw, or semaphore, based on whether used for exclusive or "shared" locking.
UCommon requires some knowledge of compiler switches and options to disable language features, the C runtime and stdlibs, and associated C headers.
The current version supports compiling with GCC, which is commonly found on GNU/Linux, OS/X, BSD based systems, and many other platforms; and the Sun Workshop compiler, which is offered as an example how to adapt UCommon for additional compilers.
UCommon may also be built with GCC cross compiling for mingw32 for Microsoft Windows targets using the Redhat w32 pthread library.
The minimum platform support for UCommon is a modern and working posix pthread threading library.
UCommon does not support other non-posix threading models such as Microsoft Windows threads or non-preemtive threading libraries like GNU pth, so that we could optimize development efforts around Posix pthread exclusively.
What`s New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· introduction of scrub utility for secure file deletion.
· introduction of mdsub utility for computing file hashes.
· shell::printf always flushes output for console.
· Digest::reset now resets even for cleared contexts.
