Re: Linked List Implementation

[<tomas at tuxteam dot de>]

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On Sun, Nov 26, 2017 at 08:26:35PM -0500, Charlie Sale wrote:
> Hello glibc
> 
> I was wondering why glibc does not have any sort of linked list or related
> data structures implemented? Is glibc not the place for it, or is there
> some other reason? Because if there is no reason for there not to be a
> linked list implementation, I thought about giving it a shot. Would it be
> appreciated?

For historical reasons, mainly. But nowadays standards have settled in a
way that it doesn't make sense to pack even more into libc than currently
is. As of now, libc concerns itself with some string handling, (float,
double) numeric functions and (the biggest part) operating system
interface. And that's already a tall order, mind you :-)

See [1] for a good overview on what is there and how it came to be.

As far as I know there are no "standard" libraries for the classical
algorithms and data structures in C, although if you look around you'll
find many good implementations as spin-off of several projects.

The C++ folks have gone some way into standardizing this (cf. STL [2]),
perhaps because in C++ it's somewhat easier to express generic
algorithms.

Cheers

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libc
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Template_Library

- -- tomás
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