Naughty Buffers 😈

Naughty Buffers is a C99 library that provides generic, type-unsafe, "stretchy buffer" that can hold any type of data internally and allows you to access them later. It automatically grows when assigning, pushing or inserting new data blocks.

It also allows you to specify your own memory-management replacement functions for when you don't want to use standard ones (malloc and friends)

Features

• Buffer automatically grows to accommodate for data
• Allows for custom memory functions set at runtime
• Macros to generate type-safe* wrappers
• No external dependencies
• Clear, easy to use and fully documented API
• Unit tested 😁
• Valgrind: All heap blocks were freed -- no leaks are possible

Wrappers are not really type-safe at implementation level, but they allow you to use a type-safe API.

Examples

Non-advanced usage

#include "naughty-buffers/buffer.h"
#include <stdio.h>

int read_int(struct nb_buffer * buffer, size_t index) {
  int * read_value = nb_at(&buffer, index);
  return *read_value;
}

int main(void) {
    struct nb_buffer buffer;
    nb_init(&buffer, sizeof(int));
    
    int value = 10;
    nb_push(&buffer, &value);
    printf("%d\n", read_int(&buffer, 0)); // prints 10
    
    value = 30;
    nb_insert(&buffer, 0, &value);
    printf("%d\n", read_int(&buffer, 0)); // prints 30
    
    
    value = 50;
    nb_assign(&buffer, 1, &value);
    printf("%d\n", read_int(&buffer, 1)); // prints 50
    printf("%d\n", read_int(&buffer, 0)); // prints 30
    
    return 0;
}

With custom memory functions

#include "naughty-buffers/buffer.h"

void * my_alloc(size_t memory_size, void * memory_context);
void my_release(void * ptr, void * memory_context);
void * my_realloc(void * ptr, size_t memory_size, void * memory_context);
void * my_copy(void * destination, const void * source, size_t size, void * memory_context);
void * my_move(void * destination, const void * source, size_t size, void * memory_context);
void * memory_context;


int main(void) {
  struct nb_buffer buffer;
  nb_init_advanced(
      &buffer,
      sizeof(int),
      my_alloc,
      my_realloc,
      my_release,
      my_copy,
      my_move,
      memory_contex
  );
  
  return 0;
}

Check the tests folder and the examples folder for more complex examples

Integrating with your code

Using pre-built releases

Download a pre-built release package suitable for your platform and uncompress it somewhere you'll remember later (usually where you put other development libraries). Let's assume you uncompressed naughty-buffers to /home/me/libs/naughty-buffers.

Using CMake: If you're using CMake, specify the variable CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH to point to it before running CMake in your project:

cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/home/me/libs

Then you can use find_package(naughty-buffers) and target_link_libraries(<your-executable> PUBLIC naughty-buffers) to link <your-executable> against naughty-buffers.

Not using CMake: Assuming you uncompressed naughty-buffers to the same path as above, you should configure your build system to look for include files inside /home/me/libs/naughty-buffers/include and to look for shared objects to link against inside /home/me/libs/naughty-buffers/lib. In case of Windows, you should also point your linker to naughty-buffers/bin as well.

Using a source release and CMake

Uncompress naughty-buffers in a folder inside your project (e.g, your-project/third-party/naughty-buffers) and then use add_subdirectory(third-party/naughty-buffers EXCLUDE_FROM_ALL) to add the library target. Then you can use find_package(naughty-buffers) and target_link_libraries(<your-executable> PUBLIC naughty-buffers) to link <your-executable> against naughty-buffers.

Compiling the .c files directly in your project is not recommended nor supported.

Compile from source

You'll need CMake installed and in your path and also capable of finding you compiler and linker. Then, after checking out this repository:

mkdir build/
cd build/
cmake ..
cmake --build .

Examples

Examples for C are in the src/examples folder. To build them, when running cmake as in Compile from source, add the following variable:

cmake .. -DBUILD_EXAMPLES=1

Documentation

See here