Story 2014-03-20 3GK Lightweight C library musl 1.0 released

Lightweight C library musl 1.0 released

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in linux on (#3GK)
musl, a lightweight alternative to the GNU Clibrary , has just had its version 1.0 released after three hard years of development. musl is, according to its developers:
a lightweight, fast, simple, MIT-licensed, correctness-oriented alternative to the GNU C library (glibc), uClibc, or Android's Bionic. At this point musl provides all mandatory C99 and POSIX interfaces (plus a lot of widely-used extensions), and well over 5000 packages are known to build successfully against musl.
musl is indeed lightweight, and a chart showing how musl compares to uClibc, dietlibc, and eglibc shows musl compares favorably and often outshines other small C libraries. Several options are available for trying musl. Compiler toolchains are available from the musl-cross project, and several new musl-based Linux distributions are already available (Sabotage and Snowflake, among others).

Some well-established distributions including OpenWRT and Gentoo are in the process of adding musl-based variants, and others (Aboriginal, Alpine, Bedrock, Dragora) are adopting musl as their default libc.
Reply 2 comments

what are the contexts where this is preferred? (Score: 2, Interesting)

by rocks@pipedot.org on 2014-03-20 22:24 (#QG)

when do you swap in a lightweight library to replace a more standard-bloated one? I'm curious about people's choices on this.

Re: what are the contexts where this is preferred? (Score: 1)

by marqueeblink@pipedot.org on 2014-03-21 21:28 (#RD)

I suspect there's a certain amount of inertia and "Nobody ever got fired for..." in favor of sticking with gcc. It takes time to vet something as large as libc. The size of the library is probably a non-issue for server apps.