this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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What are you talking about? https://docs.gtk.org/glib/data-structures.html
Well, let’s be real: many C programs don’t want to rely on Glib, and licensing (as the other reply mentioned) is only one reason. Glib is not exactly known for high performance, and is significantly slower than the alternatives supported by the other languages I mentioned.
OK, think of all the other C collection libraries there must be out there!
Which one should I pick then, that is both as fast as the std solutions in the other languages and as reusable for arbitrary use cases?
Because it sounds like your initial pick made you loose the machine efficiency argument and you can’t have it both ways.
Glib us licensed under LGPL. So unless your project is happy with that, it's as if it didn't exist. That's one of the problems of having a small standard library.
It's one of the more permissive licenses - who the hell is going to have a problem with lgpl? You can ship it with proprietary applications.
It’s a single counterexample. there are many, many such libraries for C and the programmer does not have to roll their own.