This repository provides general purpose data structures that are useful when programming in C. Each data structure is implemented as a single header that only depends on the C standard library (and possibly other headers from this repository). Example usage is provided in the source files with the same names.
Any C23 compliant C compiler should be able to handle the data structures without any special flags. Most of the code should also compile under C99, but for anything lower, you might need to get your hands dirty.
The employed “error handling strategy” is assert. This might not be compatible with your project
if you want to be able to recover from errors.
Data structures manage their memory using arena allocators, which streamline memory management by grouping allocations together and freeing them all at once. I first learned about this type of allocator here which made me want to try it out for myself. If you require heap allocated objects, you might need to get your hands dirty again, because there is no dedicated destruction function.
Some creation parameters are optional and accept 0 or nullptr. For example, if you want to
create a list, but never need to compare list items, you don't need to pass a comparison function.
Even though I'm big sucker for performance, the primary focus of this project is flexibility.
Therefore, the stored data is a void pointer and the user needs to provide the size of the data
and an appropriate copy function. If you are not storing anything complicated, or you are fine with
shallow copies, the default copy function arena_memcpy is your friend.
- Memory
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dump.h: inspect memory buffers -
arena.h: arena allocator
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- Linear
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list.h: doubly linked list
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- Hashing
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dict.h: associative array (4-ary hash trie) -
set.h: set (value-less dict)
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- Trees
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heap.h: binary heap
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Contributions are welcome! If you find a bug or have a feature request, please open an issue. To contribute code:
- Fork the repository.
- Create a new branch for your feature or bug fix.
- Commit your changes and push to your fork.
- Open a pull request to the main branch.
- Me for Advent of Code in 2024
The code in this repository is licensed under the GPL-3.0 license.