Collections Library in C

A slowly expanding collection of collection implementations in C for Linux and MacOS. So far we have,

Resizing Array

• Add items to the array and it will expend / contract as required
• Doubles in size whenever it is full
• Halves in size whenever a quarter full

Priority Queue

• Add items to the queue and initialise with a compare function
• Compare function defines priority
• Items will be returned in priority order

Hash Table

• Associates values to keys using a hash function
• Collisions handled by sequential chaining
• Table resizes dynamically to minimise collisions and wasted space

Common Functions

• Return the number of items in the collection
• Iterate over the collection
• Shallow copy a collection to another of the same type
• Free a collection, and optionally the data it refers to

For example,

/* Get the number of items in some collection */
int c = clxns_count(array);

/* Iterate... */
void *iter = clxns_iter_new(array);
while (clxns_iter_move_next(iter))
{
    char *res = clxns_iter_get_next(iter);
    printf("%s\n", res);
}

clxns_iter_free(iter);

/* Copy a collection */
void *duplicate = clxns_copy(array);

/* Free a collection and all memory it refers to */
clxns_free(array, 1);

Building, Running Unit Tests and Installing

In the top level directory

$ make               # build the library and unit tests
$ make tests         # run the unit tests
$ sudo make install  # install to /usr/include

On Linux you will then need to run ldconfig to pick up the installed library

$ sudo ldconfig

You can confirm that the library was installed correctly

$ ldconfig -p | grep libclxns
        libclxns.so (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/local/lib/libclxns.so