Glibc
| GNU C Library | |
|---|---|
| Original author(s) | Roland McGrath |
| Developer(s) | GNU Project, most contributions by Ulrich Drepper |
| Initial release | 1987 |
| Stable release | 2.41
/ 29 January 2025 |
| Repository | |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Unix-like |
| Type | Runtime library |
| License | 2001: LGPL-2.1-or-later 1992: LGPL-2.0-or-later |
| Website | www |
The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the GNU Project implementation of the C standard library. It provides a wrapper around the system calls of the Linux kernel and other kernels for application use. Despite its name, it now also directly supports C++ (and, indirectly, other programming languages). It was started in the 1980s by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU operating system.
glibc is free software released under the GNU Lesser General Public License. The GNU C Library project provides the core libraries for the GNU system, as well as many systems that use Linux as the kernel. These libraries provide critical APIs including ISO C11, POSIX.1-2008, BSD, OS-specific APIs and more. These APIs include such foundational facilities as open, read, write, malloc, printf, getaddrinfo, dlopen, pthread_create, crypt, login, exit and more.