GLib is a lower-level library that provides many useful definitions and functions available for use when creating GDK and GTK applications. These include definitions for basic types and their limits, standard macros, type conversions, byte order, memory allocation, warnings and assertions, message logging, timers, string utilities, hook functions, a lexical scanner, dynamic loading of modules, and automatic string completion. A number of data structures (and their related operations) are also defined, including memory chunks, doubly-linked lists, singly-linked lists, hash tables, strings (which can grow dynamically), string chunks (groups of strings), arrays (which can grow in size as elements are added), balanced binary trees, N-ary trees, quarks (a two-way association of a string and a unique integer identifier), keyed data lists (lists of data elements accessible by a string or integer id), relations and tuples (tables of data which can be indexed on any number of fields), and caches.
A summary of some of GLib's capabilities follows; not every function, data structure, or operation is covered here. For more complete information about the GLib routines, see the GLib documentation. One source of GLib documentation is http://www.gtk.org/.
If you are using a language other than C, you should consult your language's binding documentation. In some cases your language may have equivalent functionality built-in, while in other cases it may not.
Definitions for the extremes of many of the standard types are:
G_MINFLOAT G_MAXFLOAT G_MINDOUBLE G_MAXDOUBLE G_MINSHORT G_MAXSHORT G_MAXUSHORT G_MININT G_MAXINT G_MAXUINT G_MINLONG G_MAXLONG G_MAXULONG G_MININT64 G_MAXINT64 G_MAXUINT64
Also, the following typedefs. The ones left unspecified are dynamically set depending on the architecture. Remember to avoid counting on the size of a pointer if you want to be portable! E.g., a pointer on an Alpha is 8 bytes, but 4 on Intel 80x86 family CPUs.
char gchar; short gshort; long glong; int gint; int gboolean; unsigned char guchar; unsigned short gushort; unsigned long gulong; unsigned int guint; float gfloat; double gdouble; unsigned int gsize; signed int gssize; void* gpointer; const void* gconstpointer; gint8 guint8 gint16 guint16 gint32 guint32 gint64 guint64