glibc VS rfcs

Compare glibc vs rfcs and see what are their differences.

glibc

Unofficial mirror of sourceware glibc repository. Updated daily. (by bminor)
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glibc rfcs
45 666
1,213 5,711
3.2% 0.9%
9.8 9.8
9 days ago 3 days ago
C Markdown
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

glibc

Posts with mentions or reviews of glibc. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-09.
  • I cut GTA Online loading times by 70% (2021)
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jan 2024
  • Cray-1 performance vs. modern CPUs
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Dec 2023
    I wonder if you’re using a different definition of ‘vectorized’ from the one I would use. For example glibc provides a vectorized strlen. Here is the sse version: https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/master/sysdeps/x86_64/m...

    It’s pretty simple to imagine how to write an unoptimized version: read a vector from the start of the string, compare it to 0, convert that to a bitvector, test for equal to zero, then loop or clz and finish.

    I would call this vectorized because it operates on 16 bytes (sse) at a time.

    There are a few issues:

    1. You’re still spending a lot of time in the scalar code checking loop conditions.

    2. You’re doing unaligned reads which are slower on old processors

    3. You may read across a cache line forcing you to pull a second line into cache even if the string ends before then.

    4. You may read across a page boundary which could cause a segfault if the next page is not accessible

    So the fixes are to do 64-byte (ie cache line) aligned accesses which also means page-aligned (so you won’t read from a page until you know the string doesn’t end in the previous page). That deals with alignment problems. You read four vector registers at a time but this doesn’t really cost much more if the string is shorter as it all comes from one cache line. Another trick in the linked code is that it first finds the cache line by reading the first 16 bytes then merging in the next 3 groups with unsigned-min, so it only requires one test against a zero vector instead of 4. Then it finds the zero in the cache line. You need to do a bit of work in the first iteration to become aligned. With AVX, you can use mask registers on reads to handle that first step instead.

  • Setenv Is Not Thread Safe and C Doesn't Want to Fix It
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Nov 2023
    That was also my thought. To my knowledge `/etc/localtime` is the creation of Arthur David Olson, the founder of the tz database (now maintained by IANA), but his code never read `/etc/localtime` multiple times unless `TZ` environment variable was changed. Tzcode made into glibc but Ulrich Drepper changed it to not cache `/etc/localtime` when `TZ` is unset [1]; I wasn't able to locate the exact rationale, given that the commit was very ancient (1996-12) and no mailing list archive is available for this time period.

    [1] https://github.com/bminor/glibc/commit/68dbb3a69e78e24a778c6...

  • CTF Writeup: Abusing select() to factor RSA
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Nov 2023
    That's not really what the problem is. The actual code is fine.

    The issue is that the definition of `fd_set` has a constant size [1]. If you allocate the memory yourself, the select() system call will work with as many file descriptors as you care to pass to it. You can see that both glibc [2] and the kernel [3] support arbitrarily large arrays.

    [1] https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/master/misc/sys/select....

    [2] https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/master/sysdeps/unix/sys...

    [3] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

  • How are threads created in Linux x86_64
    3 projects | dev.to | 22 Sep 2023
    The source code for that is here.
  • Using Uninitialized Memory for Fun and Profit (2008)
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Sep 2023
    Expanding macro gives three GCC function attributes [2]: `__attribute__ ((malloc))`, `__attribute__ ((alloc_size(1)))` and `__attribute__ ((warn_unused_result))`. They are required for GCC (and others recognizing them) to actually ensure that they behave as the standard dictates. Your own malloc-like functions won't be treated same unless you give similar attributes.

    [1] https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/807690610916df8aef17cd1...

    [2] https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Common-Function-Attribute...

  • “csinc”, the AArch64 instruction you didn’t know you wanted
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Jun 2023
    IFunc relocations is what enables glibc to dynamically choose the best memcpy routine to use at runtime based on the CPU.

    see https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/glibc-2.31/sysdeps/x86_...

  • memmove() implementation in strictly conforming C -- possible?
    2 projects | /r/C_Programming | 27 Apr 2023
    memmove can be very well implemented in pure C, libc implementations usually have a "generic" (meaning, architecture independent) fallback. Here is musl generic implementation and its x86-64 assembly implementation. For glibc, implementation is a bit more complex, having multiple architectures implemented, but you could find a generic implementation with these two files: memmove.c and generic/memcopy.h.
  • Fedora 38 LLVM vs. Team Fortress 2
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Apr 2023
    Yeah, looks like the Q_strcat(pszContentPath, "/"); is invalid, as glibc has only allocated exactly enough to fit the path in the buffer returned by realpath().

    Interestingly, the open group spec says that a null argument to realpath is "Implementation defined" [0]

    And the linux (glibc) man pages say it allocates a buffer "Up to PATH_MAX" [1]

    I guess "strlen(path)" is "Up to PATH_MAX", but the man page seems unclear - you could read that as implying the buffer is always allocated to PATH_MAX size, but that's not what seems to be happening, just effectively calling strdup() [2]. I have no idea how to feed back to the linux man pages, but might be worth clarifying there.

    [0] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009696799/functions/re...

    [1] https://linux.die.net/man/3/realpath

    [2] https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/0b9d2d4a76508fdcbd9f421...

  • Method implementations
    2 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 15 Feb 2023
    For the actual sources you will have to look at one of the mirrors of the C standard library, such as https://github.com/bminor/glibc/tree/master/sysdeps/ieee754/dbl-64

rfcs

Posts with mentions or reviews of rfcs. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-25.
  • Ask HN: What April Fools jokes have you noticed this year?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Apr 2024
    RFC: Add large language models to Rust

    https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3603

  • Rust to add large language models to the standard library
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Apr 2024
  • Why does Rust choose not to provide `for` comprehensions?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Mar 2024
    Man, SO and family has really gone downhill. That top answer is absolutely terrible. In fact, if you care, you can literally look at the RFC discussion here to see the actual debate: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/582

    Basically, `for x in y` is kind of redundant, already sorta-kinda supported by itertools, and there's also a ton of macros that sorta-kinda do it already. It would just be language bloat at this point.

    Literally has nothing to do with memory management.

  • Coroutines in C
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Feb 2024
  • Uv: Python Packaging in Rust
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Feb 2024
    Congrats!

    > Similarly, uv does not yet generate a platform-agnostic lockfile. This matches pip-tools, but differs from Poetry and PDM, making uv a better fit for projects built around the pip and pip-tools workflows.

    Do you expect to make the higher level workflow independent of requirements.txt / support a platform-agnostic lockfile? Being attached to Rye makes me think "no".

    Without being platform agnostic, to me this is dead-on-arrival and unable to meet the "Cargo for Python" aim.

    > uv supports alternate resolution strategies. By default, uv follows the standard Python dependency resolution strategy of preferring the latest compatible version of each package. But by passing --resolution=lowest, library authors can test their packages against the lowest-compatible version of their dependencies. (This is similar to Go's Minimal version selection.)

    > uv allows for resolutions against arbitrary target Python versions. While pip and pip-tools always resolve against the currently-installed Python version (generating, e.g., a Python 3.12-compatible resolution when running under Python 3.12), uv accepts a --python-version parameter, enabling you to generate, e.g., Python 3.7-compatible resolutions even when running under newer versions.

    This is great to see though!

    I can understand it being a flag on these lower level, directly invoked dependency resolution operations.

    While you aren't onto the higher level operations yet, I think it'd be useful to see if there is any cross-ecosystem learning we can do for my MSRV RFC: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3537

    How are you handling pre-releases in you resolution? Unsure how much of that is specified in PEPs. Its something that Cargo is weak in today but we're slowly improving.

  • RFC: Rust Has Provenance
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Jan 2024
  • The bane of my existence: Supporting both async and sync code in Rust
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Jan 2024
    In the early days of Rust there was a debate about whether to support "green threads" and in doing that require runtime support. It was actually implemented and included for a time but it creates problems when trying to do library or embedded code. At the time Go for example chose to go that route, and it was both nice (goroutines are nice to write and well supported) and expensive (effectively requires GC etc). I don't remember the details but there is a Rust RFC from when they removed green threads:

    https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/0806be4f282144cfcd55b...

  • Why stdout is faster than stderr?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Jan 2024
    I did some more digging. By RFC 899, I believe Alex Crichton meant PR 899 in this repo:

    https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/899

    Still, no real discussion of why unbuffered stderr.

  • Go: What We Got Right, What We Got Wrong
    22 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jan 2024
  • Ask HN: What's the fastest programming language with a large standard library?
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2023
    Rust has had a stable SIMD vector API[1] for a long time. But, it's architecture specific. The portable API[2] isn't stable yet, but you probably can't use the portable API for some of the more exotic uses of SIMD anyway. Indeed, that's true in .NET's case too[3].

    Rust does all this SIMD too. It just isn't in the standard library. But the regex crate does it. Indeed, this is where .NET got its SIMD approach for multiple substring search from in the first place[4]. ;-)

    You're right that Rust's standard library is conservatively vectorized though[5]. The main thing blocking this isn't the lack of SIMD availability. It's more about how the standard library is internally structured, and the fact that things like substring search are not actually defined in `std` directly, but rather, in `core`. There are plans to fix this[6].

    [1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/arch/index.html

    [2]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/simd/index.html

    [3]: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/72fae0073b35a404f03c3...

    [4]: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/88394#issuecomment-16...

    [5]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/memchr#why-is-the-standard-lib...

    [6]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3469

What are some alternatives?

When comparing glibc and rfcs you can also consider the following projects:

musl - Unofficial mirror of etalabs musl repository. Updated daily.

rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

cosmopolitan - build-once run-anywhere c library

bubblewrap - Low-level unprivileged sandboxing tool used by Flatpak and similar projects

dns - DNS library in Go

crates.io - The Rust package registry

0.30000000000000004 - Floating Point Math Examples

polonius - Defines the Rust borrow checker.

json-c - https://github.com/json-c/json-c is the official code repository for json-c. See the wiki for release tarballs for download. API docs at http://json-c.github.io/json-c/

Rust-for-Linux - Adding support for the Rust language to the Linux kernel.

degasolv - Democratize dependency management.

rust-gc - Simple tracing (mark and sweep) garbage collector for Rust