Does standard c library provides linked list etc. data structures?

Question

Do standard C library implementations, especially glibc (the GNU C Library) provide linked lists, stack et al. data structures, or do we have to roll our own?

Thanks.

Solution 1

The C Standard does not provide data structures like linked list and stack.Some compiler implementations might provide their own versions but their usage will be non portable across different compilers.

So Yes, You have to write your own.

Solution 2

The C standard doesn't, glibc however provides lists, tail queues, and circular queues in <sys/queue.h> according to the queue man page those come from BSD and not POSIX.

Solution 3

There are hash tables, binary trees and binary search stuff in glibc. Those are part of C89, C99 and/or POSIX.1 standards. Some reason linked list is not there.

More info from man pages: hsearch, tsearch and bsearch

Note: Some of those have bad design. For example: hsearch allows only one hash table per process. The GNU compiler, gcc/glibc, provides reentrant versions hcreate_r, hsearch_r, and hdestroy_r that allow multiple hash tables. See also Stack Overflow's How to use hcreate_r.

Solution 4

As such C does not provide data structures but you can use the glib provided by Gnome

Queue.h ad Tree.h also provides you some Data structures

Solution 5

There's a hash table implementation in POSIX (and GLibc); see the manpages for hcreate/hdestroy/hsearch.

But, as mentioned, using glib is probably the easiest way to save yourself from reimplementing the basic data structure.

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