Table of Contents

GLib Overview

Compiling the GLib package - How to compile GLib itself

Cross-compiling the GLib package - How to cross-compile GLib

Compiling GLib Applications - How to compile your GLib application

Running GLib Applications - How to run and debug your GLib application

Changes to GLib - Incompatible changes made between successing versions of GLib

Mailing lists and bug reports - Getting help with GLib

GLib Fundamentals

Version Information - Variables and functions to check the GLib version

Basic Types - standard GLib types, defined for ease-of-use and portability.

Limits of Basic Types - portable method of determining the limits of the standard types.

Standard Macros - commonly-used macros.

Type Conversion Macros - portably storing integers in pointer variables.

Byte Order Macros - a portable way to convert between different byte orders.

Numerical Definitions - mathematical constants, and floating point decomposition.

Miscellaneous Macros - specialized macros which are not used often.

Atomic Operations - basic atomic integer and pointer operations

GLib Core Application Support

The Main Event Loop - manages all available sources of events.

Threads - thread abstraction; including threads, different mutexes, conditions and thread private data.

Thread Pools - pools of threads to execute work concurrently.

Asynchronous Queues - asynchronous communication between threads.

Dynamic Loading of Modules - portable method for dynamically loading 'plug-ins'.

Memory Allocation - general memory-handling.

IO Channels - portable support for using files, pipes and sockets.

Error Reporting - a system for reporting errors.

Message Output and Debugging Functions - functions to output messages and help debug applications.

Message Logging - versatile support for logging messages with different levels of importance.

GLib Utilities

String Utility Functions - various string-related functions.

Character Set Conversion - convert strings between different character sets using iconv().

Unicode Manipulation - functions operating on Unicode characters and UTF-8 strings.

Internationalization - gettext support macros.

Date and Time Functions - calendrical calculations and miscellaneous time stuff.

Random Numbers - pseudo-random number generator.

Hook Functions - support for manipulating lists of hook functions.

Miscellaneous Utility Functions - a selection of portable utility functions.

Lexical Scanner - a general purpose lexical scanner.

Automatic String Completion - support for automatic completion using a group of target strings.

Timers - keep track of elapsed time.

Spawning Processes - process launching with fork()/exec().

File Utilities - various file-related functions.

Shell-related Utilities - shell-like commandline handling.

Commandline option parser - parses commandline options

Glob-style pattern matching - matches strings against patterns containing '*' (wildcard) and '?' (joker).

Simple XML Subset Parser - parses a subset of XML.

Key-value file parser - parses .ini-like config files

Windows Compatibility Functions - UNIX emulation on Windows.

GLib Data Types

Memory Chunks - efficient way to allocate groups of equal-sized chunks of memory.

Doubly-Linked Lists - linked lists containing integer values or pointers to data, with the ability to iterate over the list in both directions.

Singly-Linked Lists - linked lists containing integer values or pointers to data, limited to iterating over the list in one direction.

Double-ended Queues - double-ended queue data structure.

Trash Stacks - maintain a stack of unused allocated memory chunks.

Hash Tables - associations between keys and values so that given a key the value can be found quickly.

Strings - text buffers which grow automatically as text is added.

String Chunks - efficient storage of groups of strings.

Arrays - arrays of arbitrary elements which grow automatically as elements are added.

Pointer Arrays - arrays of pointers to any type of data, which grow automatically as new elements are added.

Byte Arrays - arrays of bytes, which grow automatically as elements are added.

Balanced Binary Trees - a sorted collection of key/value pairs optimized for searching and traversing in order.

N-ary Trees - trees of data with any number of branches.

Quarks - a 2-way association between a string and a unique integer identifier.

Keyed Data Lists - lists of data elements which are accessible by a string or GQuark identifier.

Datasets - associate groups of data elements with particular memory locations.

Relations and Tuples - tables of data which can be indexed on any number of fields.

Caches - caches allow sharing of complex data structures to save resources.

Memory Allocators - allocates chunks of memory for GList, GSList and GNode.

GLib Tools

glib-gettextize - gettext internationalization utility

Index

Index of deprecated symbols

Index of new symbols in 2.2

Index of new symbols in 2.4

Index of new symbols in 2.6