cutie - C UTilitIEs

Origin: https://bitbucket.org/erikedlund/libcutie

Mirror: https://github.com/edlund/libcutie

cutie is a minimalistic collection of utilities intended to facilitate object oriented programming in C. The following OOP techniques are supported, the idea is that they will provide the bare minimum required to comfortably do OOP in C:

• Single inheritance.
• Polymorphism.
• Virtual methods (all methods are virtual).
• Basic RTTI.
• Object cloning.
• Type safety (void or char pointers are rarely used).

In theory cutie is intended to be usable for kernel, device driver and other forms of low-level development where C is a common language of choice and where higher level languages supporting OOP mechanisms are unavailable. This idea has heavily influenced cuties design and has resulted in a list of guidelines for cuties core:

• It must be fast.
• It must be usable with a minimal libc implementation.
• It must be usable without dynamic memory allocation.
• It must be usable in a multi-threaded environment without requiring synchronization primitives for object initialization.

In practice cutie is still under development and is quite possibly useless. It might never become useful for any real world scenario either.

Compiling and installing cutie

You need the following things to successfully compile cutie:

• An ISO C99 compiler and preprocessor:
  • gcc (4.4+), http://gcc.gnu.org/
  • clang (2.8+), http://clang.llvm.org/
• GNU autotools, http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/
• libtool, http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/
• Check unit test framework, http://check.sourceforge.net/
• Python (2.7+), http://www.python.org/
• amalgamate.py, https://github.com/edlund/amalgamate

If you plan to use cutie for user space development, configuring, compiling, testing and installing cutie can then be as simple as:

libcutie$ autoreconf -i
libcutie$ ./configure && make && make check && sudo -k make install

You can then #include cutie.h and link with -lcutie. For more options, simply run ./configure --help.

If you plan to use cutie for kernel space development, the best option is probably to use the amalgamation:

libcutie$ autoreconf -i
libcutie$ ./configure && make && make check && make amalgamation

Running the above commands will create cutie.h and cutie.c in your top build directory.

• Add cutie.h to an include path for your project.
• Make sure that cutie.c is compiled and linked with your project.
• Define CUTIE_KERNEL to a suitable value.

It is theoretically possible to handle kernel environments not officially supported by using the following workaround:

• Define CUTIE_KERNEL to CUTIE_KERNEL_CUSTOM.
• Write your own config include header.
• Define CUTIE_KERNEL_CUSTOM_INCLUDE to refer to your config header.

Getting started

Have a look in the directories example/ and test/.

Uninstalling cutie

Use make uninstall to undo everything make install did:

libcutie$ sudo -k make uninstall