Bionic is an implementation of the

standard C library The C standard library or libc is the standard library for the C (programming language), C programming language, as specified in the ISO C standard.International Organization for Standardization, ISO/International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC ...

, developed by

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

for its Android

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

. It differs from the

GNU C Library The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the GNU Project's implementation of the C standard library. Despite its name, it now also directly supports C++ (and, indirectly, other programming languages). It was started in the 1980s by ...

(glibc) in being designed for devices with less memory and processor power than a typical

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

system. It is a combination of new code and code from

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

NetBSD NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was forked. It continues to be actively developed and is a ...

, and

OpenBSD OpenBSD is a security-focused, free and open-source, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by forking NetBSD 1.0. According to the website, the OpenBSD project em ...

released under a

BSD license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lic ...

, rather than glibc, which uses the

GNU Lesser General Public License The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

. This difference was important in the early days of Android, when static linking was common, and is still helpful in introducing Android to software companies used to proprietary operating systems, who can be wary of the LGPL, and unclear about the differences between it and the full

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

(GPL). Bionic is a C library for use with the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...

, and provides

libc The C standard library or libc is the standard library for the C programming language, as specified in the ISO C standard.ISO/IEC (2018). '' ISO/IEC 9899:2018(E): Programming Languages - C §7'' Starting from the original ANSI C standard, it was ...

libdl Dynamic loading is a mechanism by which a computer program can, at run time, load a library (or other binary) into memory, retrieve the addresses of functions and variables contained in the library, execute those functions or access those var ...

, and

libm C mathematical operations are a group of functions in the standard library of the C programming language implementing basic mathematical functions. All functions use floating-point numbers in one manner or another. Different C standards provide d ...

( libpthread functionality is part of

, not a separate library as on some other systems). This differs from the

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...

C libraries that bionic shares code with, because they require a BSD

kernel Kernel may refer to: Computing * Kernel (operating system), the central component of most operating systems * Kernel (image processing), a matrix used for image convolution * Compute kernel, in GPGPU programming * Kernel method, in machine learnin ...

Original goals

The original publicly stated goals for Bionic were the following: * BSD-licensed: Google wanted to isolate Android applications from the effect of

copyleft Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose, ...

licenses to create a

proprietary {{Short pages monitor