Extant library (libextant)

The Extant library is a multi-function library of routines that facilitate operations in logging, dynamic shared object symbols, plugin architectures, set manipulation, memory regions and pooling among others.

The specific list of features are outlined in the documentation.

The target platform is linux, any porting to other systems is dependent on community support.

The library is written with C99 as the target language to support compiling on a significant number of architectures where linux is supported.

The library is currently tested against the following:

• Linux 4.4.159
• GCC 8.1.1
• GNU C Library 2.28
• libcheck 0.12.0
• Doxygen 1.8.14

Building

Dependencies

The library build requires:

• gcc
• make
• pkg-config
• libtool

Optionally:

• libcheck ( For running unit tests )
• Doxygen ( For generating documentation )
• libltdl ( For DSO implementation )

configure, make, make install

When building from a release package ( e.g. make dist output ), the package is unpacked and follows the typical configure, make, make install. The optional make check and make html ( and related make install-html can be used to both run the library tests ( Requires libcheck ) and documentation ( Requires Doxygen ).

Note that the make install-html builds the documentation prior to installing it. Neither make check or make html/make install-html are available without their respective dependencies ( libcheck, Doxygen ).

With both libcheck and Doxygen present on the system, the following can be run to unpack, configure, build and conditionally install ( default under /usr/local ) the software and documentation if the unit tests pass:

> tar xzf extant-0.1.tar.gz
> cd extant-0.1
> ./configure
> make
> make check && make install && make install-html

Options

For full and up to date options listing, refer to the documentation.

ltdl vs dlopen

Enforce libltdl as the DSO library

--with-libltdl Enforce libltdl DSO library

Note: If libtool dl library is available ( libltdl ) on configure, then libtool is used unless configured with the --without-libltdl option.

logger options

Set the default logging level.

--with-log-level Set default log level [(default: 15)]

Set the default log batch size which controls how often the logger thread will yield to the scheduler.

--with-log-batch-size Set default log batch size [(default: 16)]

set options

Control the maximum height of self-balancing trees.

--with-tree-max-height Set AVL/RB tree max height [(default: 16)]

Developing

Development is very similar to building, however does require a few additional dependencies. This includes the autotools (autoheader, aclocal, autoconf, automake, libtoolize, etc).

In most cases where a CI/CD pipeline is not available, the build process supports using a build directory to avoid cluttering the src path with built objects:

> git clone https://github.com/jcastillo2nd/extant.git
> cd extant
> autoreconf --install
> mkdir -p build && cd build
> ../configure
> make
> make check

The autoreconf command will generate macro files and other artifacts in addition to the build and config paths that need to be excluded from git when adding changes to commit.