Hinterlib is a libc surrogate like GLib or stb_* with better support
for old ‘embedded’ platforms like the IBM PC and the Game Boy Advance.
Originally it was named unilib for lack of a better name, and the 1.x API
still reflects this. unilib was forked into
Neopolitan to provide dedicated support for
APE and its implementing Cosmopolitan
libc.
Geneticist Razib Khan once wrote an
article
detailing the genetic history of those inhabiting the Italian peninsula. In it
he showed that during the height of imperial Rome, an intense cosmopolitanism
attracted a powerful lineage of rulers from as far away as Syria around the
time of its decline. Remarkably, when Rome depopulated in late antiquity to a
mere 30,000 people, the inhabitants were the same genetically as those who had
lived in Italy before the Roman Empire, as Etruscans. The rural hinterland
proved more lasting in our genetics, as those cosmopolitan people lived and
died in Rome leaving no trace of their lineage. As a nod to Cosmopolitan and
in contrast to the fork Neopolitan, unilib was renamed to Hinterlib.
Hinterlib is one of the most heavily developed projects under the Aquefir namesake. Its purpose is simple: provide primitive support functionality for programs on a variety of platforms. These features are similar in nature to the standard C library, and Hinterlib does work without libc where it is unavailable. The growing list of platforms it supports includes Microsoft Windows (via Win32 APIs), Apple macOS, GNU/Linux, and the Nintendo Game Boy Advance. Support for DOS systems on the IBM-PC is in planning too.
Hinterlib is written in ANSI C, and always will be. The project uses Slick Makefiles for tooling out the development process.
Hinterlib provides shorthands for all kinds of primitive data types. These are
a good deal cleaner and quicker to type than those in <stdint.h>:
Hinterlib:
u32, s16, u8, u64, ...stdint:
uint32_t, int16_t, uint8_t, uint64_t, ...There is also another shorthand called ptri (pronounced like ‘petri’). It is
an integer the same size as a pointer, and is used in place of size_t and the
like. There are also shorthands for exact-size floating point primitives.
Hinterlib provides math primitive structs for basic geometry in the 2D and 3D
contexts. It also includes structs for ranges (signed) and bounds (unsigned).
Additionally, there are also primitives for ‘vector types’; these use SIMD
intrinsics provided by the compiler where available, and transparently fall
back to plain array semantics otherwise.
Checked math macros are available to ensure against integer overflow. There
are also macros for endianness conversion operations. Hinterlib also provides
a portable uni_die() function that aborts the program, which is
ideal for dealing with programmer
errors.
UTF-8 validation, conversion, and inspection routines are also available.
There are also high-level structs and function collections for
automatically-memory-managed strings and generic arrays.
Hinterlib also integrates a portable Mersenne–Twister 19937 algorithm (of the
64-bit variety), which is included as <mt19937/random.h>.
Command line argument parsing is among the more recent additions to the library, and is the first ‘backported’ from Neopolitan. Another relatively new addition is the table module for database-like in-memory data management.
Lastly, there are cross-platform wrappers for standard I/O and heap usage,
which either wrap or implement logging and malloc() where necessary.
Hinterlib is released under the BSD-2-Clause licence. See the COPYING file
for full terms.
Hinterlib adheres to ADP 1 for its repository layout, and ADP 2 for its documentation.