Does anybody remember how to program in C? Well, its syntax is similar to that of languages such as Java, PHP and others, but C uses a data type named pointer, and an array is a pointer, too. When you define an array, the system allocates enough space for it, but when you use the array nobody keeps you from accessing elements out of that array. You will not get a “Subscript out of range” error with the file’s name and line number. What you’ll get instead is a segmentation fault or another variable’s value will change. Use a debugger to find where it happens.
The library GLib has functions that perform operations on data structures like in modern object oriented languages. For example:
Use GArray, and you can enjoy the function ‘g_array_sort’ that sorts using a user-defined comparison function. This structure also allows you to increase the size of your array without calling ‘realloc’ implicitly.
GSList and GList are the data types of singly-linked and doubly-linked respectively, and a ‘foreach’ functions are defined to perform the same operation on each of their elements.
Other data structures are hash-tables, balanced binary trees, N-ary trees, etc.
An interesting utility is the command line option parser, that will check the validity of values passed via the command line and pass the values to function and global variables defined by the user. In addition, this utility will define the ‘–help’ flag, which will print your program’s command line flags and their use.
Of course, this is not everything you can do with GLib, GLib also supports threads and processes, events, etc.
Read more here.
If you want to distribute products you developed using GLib, you might be interested in the license. GLib is distributed under the Lesser GPL license, which means that you can distribute proprietary and open-source software developed with this library.
