Section: New Software and Platforms

musl

Keywords: Standards - Library

Scientific Description: musl provides consistent quality and implementation behavior from tiny embedded systems to full-fledged servers. Minimal machine-specific code means less chance of breakage on minority architectures and better success with “write once run everywhere” C development.

musl's efficiency is unparalleled in Linux libc implementations. Designed from the ground up for static linking, musl carefully avoids pulling in large amounts of code or data that the application will not use. Dynamic linking is also efficient, by integrating the entire standard library implementation, including threads, math, and even the dynamic linker itself into a single shared object, most of the startup time and memory overhead of dynamic linking have been eliminated.

Functional Description: We participate in the development of musl, a re-implementation of the C library as it is described by the C and POSIX standards. It is lightweight, fast, simple, free, and strives to be correct in the sense of standards-conformance and safety. Musl is production quality code that is mainly used in the area of embedded devices. It gains more market share also in other areas, e.g. there are now Linux distributions that are based on musl instead of Gnu LibC.

• Participant: Jens Gustedt

• Contact: Jens Gustedt

• URL: http://www.musl-libc.org/