From: Oliver Kowalke <oliver.kowalke@gmx.de> Hi,
can a boost C++ library be required/forced to provide a C API?
As somebody who loves and uses C as well as C++ I can tell you: These languages are too different and what you asking as same as to ask from Java library to provide C++ API (even the last is simpler :-)) However if you ask if there is a good framework/set of libraries for easy C development, there are. There two big, widely deployed and uses libraries that do very fine job proving a good set of general functions: 1. GLib: threading, io, unicode, regular expression, networking, containers and more. (LGPL) 2. APR (Apache Portable Runtime) a huge set of functions like networking, memory, containers and more. (Apache license) So basically if you are looking for a set of C libraries that provide good functionality (like Boost) then these libraries are your friends. However if you looking libraries for specific tasks there are plenty: - Networking - libevent and some other friends - Threading pthread API (pthread-win32 for windows) - Regular Expressions - PCRE - Unicode - ICU - SQL - libdbi and some others - XML - libxml2 And more and more. So basically there are "Boost-for-C" libraries, they just not called Boost but rather Glib, APR :-) (And BTW some of them reacher then Boost) Artyom