GNU C Library

The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the GNU Project's implementation of the C standard library. Despite its name, it now also directly supports C++ (and indirectly other programming languages). It was started in the early 1990s by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for their GNU operating system.

Released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, glibc is free software.

History

The Glibc project was initially written mostly by Roland McGrath, working for the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in the 1980s.

In February 1988, FSF described glibc as having nearly completed the functionality required by ANSI C. By 1992, it had the ANSI C-1989 and POSIX.1-1990 functions implemented and work was under way on POSIX.2.

In September 1995 Ulrich Drepper made his first contribution to the glibc project and gradually became over the 1990s the core contributor and maintainer of glibc. Drepper held the maintainership position for many years and accumulated until 2012 63% of all commits of the project.