CITS2002 Systems Programming  
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Where do we find functions?

  1. We've already begun writing our own functions, in the same file as main(), to simplify our code and to make it easier to read.

  2. Soon, we'll write our own functions in other, multiple files, and call them from our main file.

  3. Collections of related functions are termed libraries of functions.

    The most prominent example, that we've already seen, is C's standard library - a collection of frequently required functions that must be provided by a standards' conforming C compiler.

    In our programming, so far, we've already called library functions such as:

    printf(),  atoi(),  and  exit().

  4. Similarly, there are many task-specific 3rd-party libraries. They are not required to come with your C compiler, but may be downloaded or purchased - from Lecture 1 -

    Application domain (a sample of) 3rd-party libraries
    operating system services
    (files, directories, processes, inter-process communication)
    OS-specific libraries, e.g. glibc, System32, Cocoa
    web-based programming libcgi, libxml, libcurl
    data structures and algorithms the generic data structures library (GDSL)
    GUI and graphics development OpenGL, GTK, Qt, wxWidgets, UIKit, Win32, Tcl/Tk
    image processing (GIFs, JPGs, etc) GD, libjpeg, libpng
    networking Berkeley sockets, AT&T's TLI
    security, cryptography openssl, libmp
    scientific computing NAG, Blas3, GNU scientific library (gsl)
    concurrency, parallel and GPU programming OpenMP, CUDA, OpenCL, openLinda
    (thread support is defined in C11, but not in C99)

 


CITS2002 Systems Programming, Lecture 4, p3, 1st August 2023.