libc VS cosmopolitan

Compare libc vs cosmopolitan and see what are their differences.

libc

libc targeted for embedded systems usage. Reduced set of functionality (due to embedded nature). Chosen for portability and quick bringup. (by embeddedartistry)
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libc cosmopolitan
2 201
479 15,180
1.0% -
7.3 9.8
3 months ago 4 days ago
C C
MIT License ISC License
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.

libc

Posts with mentions or reviews of libc. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-01-22.
  • Nolibc: A minimal C-library replacement shipped with the kernel
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Jan 2023
    Seems unlikely. My spot check of the the two vfprintf implementations shows no flow from one to the other, and shows that part of the Cosmopolitan code has an older lineage than nolibc.

    The nolibc source has many reference to copyright held by "Willy Tarreau", under LGPL-2.1 OR MIT license, with a copyright date starting in 2017.

    The string "Tarreau" does not exist in the Cosmopolitan library, so that's a strong negative there. Let's look closer.

    The file organization is quite different. And so is the implementation. So that's another negative.

    Compare the vfprintf in nolibc at https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.2-rc4/source/tools/inclu... (a 'minimal vfprintf()') with the one in cosmopolitan starting at https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/libc/stdio/....

    Right away we can see nolibc places many functions in the same file while Cosmopolitan uses a one-function-per-filename organization.

    Cosmopolitan's fvprintf locks the file (which nolibc doesn't need to do) then calls vfprintf_unlocked which calls __fmt at https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/libc/fmt/fm... , which is the actual implementation. It look very different from NOLIBC's.

    Okay, so perhaps that's they way now but not at the beginning?

    We can also go back to Cosmopolitan's original implementation and see how vfprintf goes through https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/c91b3c50068224929c... to call "palandprintf", which https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/c91b3c50068224929c... says is copyright "Marco Paland" from 2014-2019.

    That's a few years older than the start of nolibc, available from https://github.com/mpaland/printf , and part of https://github.com/embeddedartistry/libc , a "libc targeted for embedded systems usage".

    Thus, multiple factors seem to agree that nolibc code is not used in the Cosmopolitan library.

  • Any ultra portable libc?
    1 project | /r/unix | 3 Dec 2021

cosmopolitan

Posts with mentions or reviews of cosmopolitan. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-15.
  • Python Is Portable
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Apr 2024
    The reality is a bit different, the work on Python 3.6 was checked into the Cosmopolitan repo and I have been able to use it for production workloads that are in pure python. [0]

    As Cosmopolitan Libc has evolved, it has been possible to compile more software without modifications, and that includes latest Python through a project called superconfigure[1].

    Last person who tried to reproduce it from scratch did it last week (granted it too them a few days of solid work) but in the end they ended with a portable binary with Python 3.11.9, brotli, ssl and asyncio for their work related project.[2]

    [0] https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/tree/master/third_party...

  • Ask HN: What Underrated Open Source Project Deserves More Recognition?
    63 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Mar 2024
    Cosmopolitan https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan and https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/index.html

    Some genius realized that you can actually embed valid win32 programs inside valid posix shell scripts, and found a way to make a C cross-platform solution out of it, meaning that you can write C programs that compile to a single executable that will run on (quoting the site) Linux + Mac + Windows + FreeBSD + OpenBSD + NetBSD + BIOS

    It all started from this post.

  • Cosmopolitan – build-once run-anywhere C library
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Feb 2024
  • Show HN: Usr/bin/env Docker run
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Jan 2024
    For this .args file, put one argument per line. This will run on start. You can use `/zip/mydepencency.anything` to read from files, but if you have an executable dependency you'll need to extract it first.

    You can do this with any software you can compile with comsocc, by adding a call to LoadZipArgs[1] in the main function.

    It'seasy to get started, your ideas will branch out as soon as you start playing with it.

    [1]: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/master/tool/args/a...

  • Libwebsockets
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jan 2024
    FWIW there is ongoing work with good progress to add websocket support to redbean (https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/pull/967)
  • Release Cosmopolitan v3.2
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Jan 2024
  • Cosmopolitan v3.2
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Jan 2024
  • Ask HN: ANSI escape sequences reference docs?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Jan 2024
    Check out this comment by jart (cosmpolitan author) here: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/issues/766#issuecomment...

    it might help but not sure how comprehensive it is! would it be a bad idea for you to check out the source code of other popular emulators (maybe iTerm 2^0) ?

    0: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Agnachman%2FiTerm2%20ansi&...

  • Actually Portable Vim (With a Cute Vimrc)
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Dec 2023
    The binary was compiled with Cosmopolitan Libc [0], and therefore the binary will execute natively on Linux, Mac, Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and bare metal (BIOS boot).

    I would call that portable.

    [0] https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

  • Show HN: PyApp – runtime installer for Python applications
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Dec 2023
    will go on my "to try" list where i already have cosmopolitan [2]. my last setup (windows) was shiv + wine + nsis (used that as pyinstaller had some issues)[2]

    [1] https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/issues/141#issuecomment...

What are some alternatives?

When comparing libc and cosmopolitan you can also consider the following projects:

libspng - Simple, modern libpng alternative

src - Read-only git conversion of OpenBSD's official CVS src repository. Pull requests not accepted - send diffs to the tech@ mailing list.