Glibc

The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the GNU Project's implementation of the C standard library. 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. Released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, glibc is free software. 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. The glibc project was initially written mostly by Roland McGrath, working for the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in the summer of 1987 as a teenager. In February 1988, FSF described glibc as having nearly completed the functionality required by ANSI C. By 1992, it had the ANSI C-1989 and POSIX.1-1990 functions implemented and work was under way on POSIX.2. In September 1995 Ulrich Drepper made his first contribution to the glibc and by 1997 most commits were made by him. Drepper held the maintainership position for many years and until 2012 accumulated 63% of all commits to the project. In May 2009 glibc was migrated to a Git repository. In 2010, a licensing issue was resolved which was caused by the Sun RPC implementation in glibc that was not GPL compatible. It was fixed by re-licensing the Sun RPC components under the BSD license. In 2014, glibc suffered from an ABI breakage bug on s390. In July 2017, 30 years after he started glibc, Roland McGrath announced his departure, "declaring myself maintainer emeritus and withdrawing from direct involvement in the project. These past several months, if not the last few years, have proven that you don't need me anymore". In 2018, maintainer Raymond Nicholson removed a joke about abortion from the glibc source code.